


Points of Convergence

by AstridContraMundum



Series: Ask Me No More [3]
Category: Endeavour (TV)
Genre: Cold War drama, Domestic Fluff, Episode: s04e01 Game, Episode: s04e02 Canticle, Episode: s04e04 Harvest, Multi, Period-Typical Homophobia, brief allusion to suicide, case-fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-16
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:41:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 126,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22279582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstridContraMundum/pseuds/AstridContraMundum
Summary: A case involving a chess match, a stolen Romanov brooch, a nuclear power station, and a recovered Enigma machine threatens to exacerbate Cold War tensions—and to resurrect the ghosts of DC Morse's past.
Relationships: Anthony Donn/Endeavour Morse, Dorothea Frazil & Endeavour Morse, Endeavour Morse & Fred Thursday, Endeavour Morse & Peter Jakes, George Fancy/Shirley Trewlove, Joss Bixby/Endeavour Morse
Series: Ask Me No More [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1400089
Comments: 269
Kudos: 146





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, everyone, and welcome to part three of this AU! 
> 
> I just wanted to add a note at the beginning, setting up the story's timeline. 
> 
> This story begins with a series of flashbacks, set in 1962, just like the beginning of the episode "Harvest." 
> 
> The action, however, takes place in 1967, during season 4, two years after the end of the last story, "The Spaces We Leave Behind." 
> 
> Thursday will catch everyone up in the first chapter, but I just wanted to make it all doubly clear. 
> 
> And away we gooooooo . . . .  
> Thanks for reading! :D

**September 1962**

Matthew Laxman switched on the car radio with one hand while maneuvering a tricky turn of the wheel with the other.

Then he snorted softly under his breath.

They were still on about it, the newscasters—still on about the latest crisis.

_The Soviet Union has warned the United States that an attack on Cuba—or on Soviet ships carrying supplies to the island—would plunge the world into the disaster of a universal thermonuclear war._

Laxman shook his head in disgust. As if they needed a war to destroy the planet. It was already being destroyed, right at that very moment, even as the composed and modulated BBC announcer spoke, delivering his dire warnings out over the airwaves.

He rounded yet another winding turn. Up ahead, walking along the road in the tall and blowing grass, was Nigel Warren.

What the hell was Warren wearing, anyway?

By god, he was an annoying bastard, really. Woefully eccentric, with that long, unkempt hair and that shabby coat. He looked as if he were some overgrown gnome who had stumbled straight out of the woods.

His was a figure that stood out, that would be remembered and remembered well. Didn’t he know to dress a little more inconspicuously?

He was difficult, to be sure. To say nothing of his endless talk of angels and of trumpets and of Armageddon.

But, who knew?

He might just have managed to get through the gates.

Laxman pulled over to the side of the road to wait for his compatriot.

***

Private Endeavour Morse stood alone in a small white room. The numbers trailed across the walls before him in an endless series of lines and angles, a series that never seemed to end, much like the days themselves.

He had worked and reworked the equation several times over, but it didn’t seem to balance out in the way that it should.

He stepped back, taking the whole of it in. And then he saw his error.

In the long chain of numbers, of exponents and expressions, he had missed one number.

A seven.

He scribbled it in with his left hand, as quickly as he could, feeling the hollowness of it, like the ribs just beneath his skin. Then he moved down the equation, before the number had the chance to catch up with him, making the necessary corrections down the line.

And that was it.

He had it.

He had the answer that that man had been searching for.

Perhaps Endeavour Morse should have been filled with a sense of accomplishment upon completing his assigned task, but he felt nothing. Only something that was close to acceptance.

An acceptance that felt like nothing so much as defeat.

****

Charlotte Walker made her way through the grass, striding along the high, chain-link fence that surrounded the perimeter of the Bramford Power Station, following a series of small flickers in the chestnut trees.

And there it was.

A willow warbler, small and quick and golden, darting amongst the leaves.

She flipped open a small notebook and added it to her count.

She had been reading the advance reviews for the new book, _The Silent Spring_ , all summer, but she had a feeling she wouldn’t be surprised by what she learned when she actually had the chance to study the details of Rachel Carson’s research.

She had noticed it, too.

As an ornithologist in her second year of teaching at Lady Matilda’s, Charlotte had been involved in similar studies since her undergraduate days, all with the same results: Bird populations were definitely in decline.

And in Oxfordshire, it seemed, that was doubly true in the area of Bramford Mere.

She couldn’t help but believe it had something to do with the power plant.

But she couldn’t quite prove it.

Yet.

****

Joss Bixby sat on a bench by the River Cherwell, watching two black swans glide across the dark water.

“Good afternoon, Bryton, old boy,” Louis called.

Bixby glanced up, and, for just an instant, a frown passed over his tanned and handsome face.

Well. There was nothing else for it. Orders were orders, one supposed.

As Singleton and Louis approached, he handed the files over to them, just as he had been instructed, with nothing more than a twist of his expressive mouth and a sense of dissatisfaction deep in his gut.

He had rather hoped it would be Mathilda Bagshot who met him here at the rendezvous point, but he managed, nevertheless, to mask his true feelings.

As he always did.

He might not like it much, but it looked like the investigation into the discrepancies at the Bramford Power Station would be theirs from here on out, Louis’ and Singleton’s.

Bixby—sometimes known as Jack Bryton, sometimes as Josef Bezkrovny—was being recalled to Washington, D.C. It was as all rather hush-hush on his end, and even Singleton and Louis, who sat beside him blithely flipping through the files, had no idea that relations between their respective nations, the US and the UK, had reached a new low, possibly its lowest point since 1812.

Kim Philby, first secretary to the British Embassy in D.C., had fallen under a cloud of suspicion—a suspicion of colluding with the Soviets—filling Bixby’s directors with a sense of mistrust, and sending all Anglo-American joint endeavors under review.

It was all out of Bixby’s hands now.

He’d just have to pack his bags, fly home, and trust to Singleton and Louis to finish the job.

He’d just have to hope for the best.

As the fellow said. You only get one go around the board.

*****

**September 1967**

Detective Inspector Fred Thursday stood amidst the broad green pastures of Bramford Mere, looking into a gaping hole.

Christ.

What a metaphor.

The perfect one for the mess that had become his life.

He folded his arms and scowled darkly, watching Dr. DeBryn, who stood deep at the bottom of the pit, examining the remains of a body, one that had been uncovered by a team of archeologists from up at Courtney College.

As soon as Thursday heard that the corpse had been found, an unresolved case sprang immediately to mind: that of Matthew Laxman, a botanist who had gone missing in the area, five years ago to the very day.

Oh, how dearly he would love to stick it to those bastards at County.

His hands curled into hammers of fists at the very thought of it.

It would be just the thing, just the valve to release some of the anger that had been coursing through his veins like a steady drum beat, pounding in his brain and in his chest, ever since the deadly holdup at the Wessex Bank.

The Cole brothers had been apprehended, but it wasn’t enough to satisfy that old hunger, that thirst for vengeance. The mere thought of it, of his Joan standing there, a gun pressed under her pale and frightened face, filled him with a fresh surge of rage again and again, whenever he let his thoughts wander back to that grim alleyway.

To say nothing of what had happened afterwards.

Because that day, it transpired, had been only the beginning of the violence done to the fabric of his family.

Thursday narrowed his eyes, impatiently awaiting DeBryn’s verdict. 

Yes.

Someone had to pay.

Even if it was just some witless yob at County who, five years ago, hadn’t completed an investigation in the way that he should.

Besides: why shouldn’t he take some of his bad temper out on County? Think of all the hell they had given Morse two years ago, during that nightmare with Gull.

Thursday glanced over at Morse, who remained at some distance, standing straight and tall with his hands clasped behind his back, looking off into the cow-filled pastures, pointedly turned away from the remains at the bottom the pit.

He looked older, since he had been made a Detective Constable. He had always looked a bit of a boy in uniform, Morse; the custodian’s helmet had always been a bit too unwieldy for his thin face, making him to look like nothing so much as a kiddie playing at dress-up. But now he was all austere and angular lines in his new dark suit and gray car coat, the cheap fabric of which looked to be about as thin and as sharp as the edges of his cheekbones and jawline.

Morse had come a long way these past two years, had been tested further even than Thursday ever would have imagined, ever would wished. He never would have believed that the young man who he and DeBryn had taken from the bloodbath of Clive Durrell’s house—his blue eyes blown wide in the red lights of the ambulance—would, just two years later, leap out from behind the bins in an alleyway, right at the moment that that scum Cole Matthews dug the barrel of a gun deep beneath his daughter’s chin.

“Chamber’s empty!” Morse had cried, throwing himself into the alleyway, with his usual lanky gawkiness.

His voice had cracked just enough for Thursday to hear the truth underneath the lie, but it was strong enough to cast a pallor of uncertainty over Cole Matthew’s tense face.

“And he’s too stupid to count to six!”

It took guts, Morse’s gambit, guts and a quick wit, and, sure enough, Matthews fell for it, hook, line and sinker.

“Stupid? I’ll show you stupid!” Matthews had cried.

He loosened his grip on Joan, and then turned to aim his gun at Morse.

Thursday had only a second to act.

He pulled the trigger, and in an instant, Cole Matthews jerked back, like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

Thursday approached the fallen man, a blind red pulse coursing fast through this body, hammering in his brain. At that moment, there was nothing in this world or in the next that would have given him more pleasure than to put a bullet straight into the piece of filth’s miserable skull. But somehow, even in his rage, a voice reached him through the fog that blurred his vision—a voice that wasn’t his, but _felt_ like his, a voice that once might have _been_ his, long ago, before the war.

“Don’t! Don’t let her see you do this! This isn’t you!”

“Yes, it is,” Thursday seethed.

“No, it’s not,” said the voice, and vaguely it crossed his mind how odd it should be that he should be speaking to himself in a northern accent.

“No, it’s not. It never was.”

Thursday looked up to see Joan and Morse, standing on either side of him, like twin guardians at a gate, marking a line of no return, watching him with more fear in their eyes than he had seen in either of them while facing their captors. 

And so, he had spared Matthews.

But Matthews, it transpired, had not spared him.

Not a whit or a whisper.

Because in the morning, there was a letter.

Morse had been dumbfounded, seemed to blame himself for not acting faster to secure the situation at the bank. But it obviously must have been his fault, his and Win’s, for not taking the depths of Joan’s feelings of guilt and remorse into account.

At breakfast, the four of them ate in silence, just as they had two years ago, when Morse had gone missing, leaving only a charged space of white and gold wallpaper above his chair in the corner.

It wasn’t that Joan’s departure had been completely unexpected. The kids were all getting to the age, of course, when he and Win knew they would soon be leaving home. Joan had been planning to find a flat with friends. Sam talked of joining the army. Morse had been saving up, and would soon, no doubt, be looking for a place of his own.

They had been waiting for it, almost looking forward to watching it, that gradual fluttering to the ground as the fledglings left the nest, ready to strike out on their own.

But they had never expected Cole Matthews to come along and take a slingshot to it, sending the nest crashing to the ground in a mess of straw and stray feathers.

They had never expected for one of those fledglings to disappear without a trace.

And how could tell Joan tell them not to look for her?

Wasn’t that just what Morse’s father and stepmother had done seven years ago, when Morse had disappeared off the pavement on his way to report for active duty? A fact she knew all too well?

Thursday shook his head, feeling a new wrench in his heart, while all the while the indolent cows lowed and the sun rose softly over green fields. He clenched his fists again, tightly at his sides, unsatisfied, wanting nothing so much as to pass along his misery to someone.

He didn’t know to whom, exactly.

But someone.

County, maybe.

Yeah.

“Doctor?” Thursday prompted, at last. 

In the perfectly dug-out rectangle of a pit, Dr. DeBryn straightened and stood.

“Male, age as yet undetermined. Remains somewhat compressed, but remarkably well preserved, due to the acidity of the soil,” he observed.

“Any chance it could be Laxman?” Thursday asked.

“Time of death rather mitigates against that,” DeBryn said.

“Time of death?” Strange asked. 

“Two thousand years ago.”

“Two thousand _years_?” Fancy cried.

“Yes,” DeBryn replied. “Give or take a couple of hundred years.”

So. Not Laxman, then.

Strange snorted. “We’ll have trouble notifying his next of kin.”

“Poor chap does seem to have had rather a grim time of it,” DeBryn said. “There’s trauma to the skull—an axe, perhaps, or a rock, but we also have a garrote, tightened by means of a stick. And finally, his throat has been laid open with a very sharp blade, right to left. Torture possibly.”

Morse came closer then, and crouched down, looking into the pit.

Once the lad had heard the age of the body, Thursday supposed, he must have deemed it safe to look, reassured that only the sight of clean bones—and not a decaying corpse—awaited him. 

“Or ritual,” Morse mused.

“How’s that?” Thursday asked.

“Prevailing school of thought is that places like this, bodies of water, held a supernatural significance to ancient peoples. They were seen as a gateway from one world to another. It could have been an offering made to whatever deities they worshipped.”

“Human sacrifice you mean?” 

“Hmmmm,” Morse said. “Popular with the druids.” 

Then, he stopped short and narrowed his eyes. “What’s that?” he asked, with a tilt of his head.

“What?” DeBryn asked.

“That. Just there,” Morse said.

He nodded to where something glinted in the sun. DeBryn turned round and, out of the dirt, pulled out a pair of heavy-framed glasses.

Glasses that looked much more as if they had belonged to a missing botanist than to any ancient druid. 

***

The sun shone brightly through the slats of the half-closed Venetian blinds in Mr. Bright’s office, sending the dimmed pea-green and wood paneled room into bars of shadow and light, and muting Mr. Bright himself into a mere silhouette. 

Thursday and Morse stood before Mr. Bright’s wide desk, while the Chief Superintendent leaned back in his chair, considering them. Ostensibly, they were there to report on the findings from the archeological dig, but Thursday felt sure, by the sharp glint in Mr. Bright’s eye and by the appraising look he gave Morse, that he was already mulling over something else.

He hoped it didn’t have anything to do with getting Morse involved in that chess match business over at Lovelace College. That was the last thing the lad needed, right now.

“A pair of glasses, you say?” Mr. Bright asked.

“Yes, sir,” Thursday replied. “I was wondering if they might belong to Matthew Laxman.”

“Laxman,” Mr. Bright murmured, as if trying to place the name.

“Bit before your time, sir,” Thursday explained. “He was a botanist, who went missing from his rooms at Wolsey during the long vac. Last seen by a hitchhiker, Nigel Warren. Warren said Laxman had told him that he was heading out Bramford way. But then he disappeared, car and all.”

“Any suspicion of foul play?” Mr. Bright asked. 

“It wasn’t my case, sir. County Investigation. My old bagman, DS Lott, liaised with them from the city end, and . . .”

And here, Thursday hesitated, struggling to be diplomatic when it was so much more tempting to call a spade a spade.

  
“ . . . and he may not have been as thorough as he might have been,” he concluded.

“And you’d like to set things straight,” Mr. Bright said. “Very well. Pursue inquiries as you see fit.” 

“Sir,” Thursday said.

“Now,” Mr. Bright said, leaning forward and resting his forearms on his desk. “Speaking of liaising, I have a rather special assignment for you. Specifically, for Morse.” 

“Sir?” Morse asked. 

“There’s a Russian delegation arriving at Lovelace College tomorrow, for that chess match, the one that’s been in all the papers? It’s Special Branch’s ballwick, but Division wants the local force represented.”

A look of confusion settled across Morse’s features, as if the lad wasn’t sure where Mr. Bright was heading—for once, it seemed, a bit slow on the uptake.

But perhaps that might be because Morse didn’t _want_ to see it.

“You’re a bit of a mathematician, I believe,” Mr. Bright said.

And there it was.

Morse blinked in surprise. 

“Not . . . not really, sir,” he stammered. “Not by any formal accounting of the word.”

“But still ahead of the rest of us, I’m sure. We want someone who can represent us, make a good showing, yes? I want you to act as my aide de camp throughout the Soviets’ visit.”

“But . . . But, Sir . . .”

“And whereas it’s true that the Russian delegation is here or a diplomatic mission, of sorts—an expression of good will between our two countries—we’ll still be needing to keep an eye,” Mr. Bright continued, cutting across him. “We want someone who can talk intelligently with our guests. And,” he added wryly, “to know what they’re doing, should they overstep their bounds during their visit. They’ll be right up at the colleges, after all, right where some of Britain’s most innovative research is being conducted.”

“I’m hardly any sort of mathematician, let alone a computer scientist, Sir,” Morse protested. “I hardly think . . .”

“But you do have a knowledge of coding," Mr. Bright said. 

"The barest smattering," Morse replied.

"And you would know what’s untoward, if you saw it.”

“ _Would I_?” Morse asked.

And on the two words, his voice seemed to break.

The Inspector found he understood just what Morse was thinking. What, after all, had he been working on at Clive Durrell’s all of those years?

_I have become death, the shatterer of worlds._

Thursday chanced a glance at his bagman, and found that Morse’s expression was calm enough, his stubborn jaw clenched, but that the big blue eyes were swimming.

Morse blinked again and looked away. 

Eh, bugger it.

Wasn’t that just the way?

Just as Morse’s past seemed that it might at last have the chance to fade away into the rearview mirror, some case like this would have to come up. 

In an instant, it seemed, two years of snapping at Jakes, two years of rolling his eyes at Strange, two years of snorting in contempt when Fancy overlooked something that Morse considered “obvious” on the evidence board, had all dissolved; in just one exchange, the scrappy PC who had leapt into the alleyway behind the Wessex Bank seemed to fade, leaving the shadow of the distressed young man that Thursday had once visited in hospital—the one who had not even dared to breathe his own name—in his wake.

Thursday found himself half-holding his breath, willing the lad to compose himself.

“So. It’s settled then," Mr. Bright said. "They’re expecting you over at Lovelace College in an hour, to give you a tour so you can make your security recommendations for the visit.”

Morse exhaled sharply, and then turned back to face Mr. Bright, looking resolute. He pulled himself up to his full height, his hands clasped behind his back, just as he had as he had stood out in the pasture of Bramford Mere, when he had pretended not to notice the remains of a body at the bottom of a pit.

“Sir,” Morse said.

***

It should have been a routine visit: stop by, get the lay of the land, meet the team of research fellows. Get to know what it was all about, so they wouldn’t look like a bunch of ponces in front of Professor Yuri Gradenko and the Soviet delegation.

On the one hand, Thursday could well understand why Mr. Bright had chosen Morse: they were not there purely to provide security, but to represent the city, as well.

It was Mr. Bright’s old pride in the force that had led him to choose a copper who could make intelligent conversation with the Russian scientists, who would know what the hell they were on about should the talk turn technical.

On the other hand, though….

Hmmmmm.

Was it worth it, showcasing Morse’s specialist’s knowledge, considering the fact that Morse could also be a pretentious, prickly pain in the arse?

A pain in the arse who had made it clear that he didn’t particularly _want_ this assignment? 

After all, when had the lad ever conducted himself in a manner that would lead the Chief Superintendent to believe that he might be their best man to serve in any sort of diplomatic capacity?

Thursday could tell Morse hated the idea; he could tell that Mr. Bright’s reference to his past—however oblique—had gotten his back up.

And so Thursday approached the offices at Lovelace College fully expecting the worst.

  
  


Sure enough, before they even got to the door, Morse pursed his mouth, making a sour face, affronted, no doubt, by the brute ugliness of the building.

Well.

Hard to blame the lad, there.

The offices housing the computer sciences department at Lovelace College were a new addition to the grounds, and they stood out like a sore thumb. Squat and modern, the place looked like nothing so much as a concrete block, dropped straight into a green surrounded by turrets and dreaming spires—as heavy and as practical as a tire iron sitting on a table amidst a fanciful and fragile china tea set painted in willow blue. 

The windows were mere narrow rectangles, like teeth, fierce and ruthless, and the doors simple affairs, opening right out onto the pavement—there were no sweeping marble steps here, leading one to feel as if one was being lifted up, swept away into a world of lofty ideals and hidden, esoteric knowledge.

No. It was a simple, “Come right in.”

The future awaits, one supposed.

Thursday opened the door, and Morse pulled one last face as he went through, as if determined to make clear his contempt.

“All right, Morse,” Thursday rumbled.

“Sir?” he asked, suddenly all innocence.

“Don’t come the old acid. It don’t suit.”

“But I haven’t said anything,” Morse protested.

Thursday snorted.

Not with his voice, he hadn’t. But that face spoke volumes.

But what was the point of trying to explain that to Morse? As clever as the lad was, he had all the social grace of a rusted nail sticking out of a board, fallen of the back of a lorry.

So Thursday ignored him, and made his way down the hall, toward the main office, where they were met by the senior faculty member on the project, Dr. Henry Ellsworth, a man who stood straight and tall—taller, even, than Thursday—despite his advancing years.

“Ah. Inspector Thursday. Constable Morse. We’ve been expecting you. So glad you have the chance to get acquainted with our program before the delegation arrives,” Dr. Ellsworth said.

Thursday nodded. “Doctor,” he said.

He had a full head of thick, white hair, Dr. Ellsworth, a full white beard, and a sharp and curmudgeonly gaze. He carried a walking stick topped with a silver globe, and Thursday found himself eyeing it, falling into the old habit of analyzing whether or not the old don needed it for walking or if it was merely decorative, as if he was a suspect in a murder case, and Thursday was trying to determine whether or not the old man had the strength to be have done the deed.

They exchanged pleasantries—or, at least, he and Dr. Ellsworth did—and then the don led them down a lino-tiled hallway, past spartan offices, and into a room that reminded Thursday at once of Clive Durrell’s hidden bunker, where the enormous Enigma machine had filled an entire wall.

Like the Enigma machine, the computer took up half the space in the room, a hodgepodge of gray mechanical squares and rectangles, covered in buttons and rows of blinking red lights and turning reels of tape.

Beside the thing, two men seemed to be deep in argument.

“But you need to be sure you have fed it all the parameters before you run it through that sort of test,” a man with a trim, dark beard was saying. 

“I have,” protested a younger man, one whose rock star hair—shaggy and blonde in the style of the Wildwood—belied his earnest face, sober behind heavy-framed glasses. “But it’s not going to be enough.”

“Of course, it’s enough,” the bearded man snapped.

As they entered, the both of them looked up, surprised to be caught, it seemed, during a moment of contention.

“May I present my colleagues,” Dr. Ellsworth said. “Dr. Scott Updike,” he said, with a nod to the man with the beard, “and Dr. Thomas Maxwell,” he added, nodding to the younger man.

“You’ll have to excuse us,” Dr. Updike said. “Passions are inclined to run a little high in the days running up to an important experiment such as ours.”

“That’s right,” the younger man, Dr. Maxwell, said. “The rest of the time, we’re just one big happy family,” he murmured mutinously.

“Perfectly understandable,” Thursday intoned.

“Well,” Dr. Ellsworth said, clearing his throat, as if keen to change the subject. “So. What do you think? Not bad for a jumped-up letter sorter, eh?”

“How’s that?” Thursday asked.

“Well. That’s what JASON was built for. Mr. Benn’s nationwide six-figure postal coding system.”

Morse’s mouth compressed in disapproval, his blue eyes glacially unimpressed.

Then, he fell back on his old standby.

“Mmmmmmmm," he said. 

But the name had piqued Thursday's interest.

“Jason?” the Inspector asked. 

“From JCN. Joint Computing Nexus,” Dr. Updike explained. “We’ve gotten rather attached to the old fellow, and so we decided to give him a name. Apropos really, considering we’re teaching him to think, to learn from his mistakes.”

“Mmmmmm. This chess match. Man versus machine,” Morse mused. 

“Yes,” Dr. Ellsworth said. “That's right. Of course, the chess match is just a bit of song and dance. The important bit is to get the public’s confidence up.”

“And why is that?” Morse asked. 

“Because of the new system, the one that will run the Bramford Power Station, saving all operations from any chance of human error,” the old don replied. 

For a few moments, Morse said nothing, looking stunned. 

“The _nuclear_ station?” Morse asked, at last. “Surely you’re not going to trust a _machine_ entirely to _that_.”

“There will be always be a human failsafe on standby,” Dr. Ellsworth assured him. “Largely unnecessary, though. You wouldn’t have heard, of course, of the Dartmouth Conference, held back in ‘56. We’re breaking new ground every day. Artificial Intelligence will be the wave of the future.”

“I certainly _have_ heard of it,” Morse said, tartly. “And I know that the researchers there greatly underestimated how much data and computing power a machine would need to solve real world problems. Suppose, at your power plant, that multiple problems were to arise at once?”

“That would be unlikely,” Dr. Updike said.

“Unlikely, but not impossible. How could a machine prioritize, be prepared to reason through an infinity of possible scenarios?” Morse replied. 

“Actually, given the necessary input, we’re finding that it can," Dr. Updike said.

“But how can a machine innovate? Think outside the box, think under pressure?” Morse shot back, a slight strain of desperation rising into his low and mournful voice. “You can feed it all the information on music in the world, but a computer can never write you a symphony.”

“Not quite yet, perhaps,” Dr. Ellsworth conceded. “But one day, we feel, it will be able to do just that.” 

“Well," Morse scoffed. "It wouldn’t be a very _good_ one, I wouldn't imagine."

“That all depends. Beauty is in the eye . . . or in this case the _ear_ of the beholder, I suppose,” Dr. Ellsworth shrugged.

“Mmmmmm,” Morse said, again, evidently unconvinced.

But as his eyes roved over the wall of dials and lights, he seemed to pale, his face falling into lines of defeat, and Thursday knew suddenly, with a terrible clarity, just what Morse must be thinking.

If Clive Durrell had had such a machine, would he have needed Morse?

Such was Morse’s need to feel useful, it must have been a horror to him to realize—with this new and unrelenting freshness—just what a waste it all had been.

Morse was the sort who _had_ to feel he had been valuable to _someone._

Even if only to a demented megalomaniac.

  
"All right, Morse?" Thursday asked. 

Morse swallowed and seemed to recover himself.

“Yes,” he said.

But the big eyes remained trained on the wall of vacuum tubes and tapes. 

And Thursday knew, deep in his gut, that Morse wasn't looking at JCN, Lovelace College’s new pride and joy.

That he wasn't looking at any promise of a miraculous future.

Thursday knew he was looking deep into the past.

At nothing more or less than five lost years.


	2. Chapter 2

Back at Cowley Station, Jakes was by the lone window of the main office, his sharp, thin figure slouch-shouldered as he stood behind his desk, pulling a cigarette from his lips and eying Morse critically.

“So, Cinderella,” he said. “Looks like you’ve been invited to the ball.” 

Morse rolled his eyes.

Jakes would have heard, then—would have heard that he, a freshly-minted DC, had been chosen to act as Mr. Bright’s aide-de-camp and liaison to Special Branch for the duration of the Soviet delegation’s visit.

Morse could only imagine how that had gone over.

Most likely like a lorry-load of bricks, falling right onto the toe of one of Jakes’ immaculately-shined black shoes.

Well, Jakes could have the assignment and welcome to it, as far as Morse was concerned. Thank God, he had a concert to go to that night with Tony.

Morse would sit in the fairy-lit gardens of St. James College, close his eyes and listen to Bach and Fauré, and he’d forget all about JCN, forget all about that box of tubes and wires, blinking smugly in that closet of a room as if it had all the answers, as if it offered instant knowledge and infinite wisdom at the mere press of a button.

No machine could ever supersede the human spirit, that ineffable force that persevered in the darkness, that was broken down and then rebuilt again and again until it was something finely beautiful, capable of producing music more complex than any celestial harmony, capable of producing the music that was the closest thing to divinity that Morse believed in.

He’d go to the concert and he’d lose himself to the music. And he would leave the vast awfulness of the day far behind him.

All he need do was to check in for any messages, and he and Inspector Thursday would be off for home. He’d change into his evening suit, and then Tony would come by, and . . .

“Hey there, matey,” Strange called, hurrying into the office.

All three of the officers in the room—Jakes, Morse and Fancy—looked up at Strange’s greeting, uncertain as to which of them was being heralded.

Almost immediately, Strange made a beeline for Jakes, thus answering the question. Morse and Fancy returned their attention to putting their desks to rights, to wrapping things up for the end of the workday.

“Do us a favor, matey,” Strange said. “This bird I’m stepping out with has a cousin in town, and . . .”

“Oh no,” Jakes said, at once, stubbing his cigarette out into a glass ashtray on his desk. “I already have a date.”

“You do,” Strange said, flatly, as if testing the validity of his words.

“Yes. I do,” Jakes said. “And I wouldn’t break it for all the wide world. So don’t bother asking.”

Strange turned at once to Fancy, looking at him with a plea in his eyes.

“I can’t,” Fancy said, at once, before Strange could even ask. “I’m not on the market, am I? I’m spoken for, lads. I’m all Shirl’s.”

Jakes and Strange both considered him dubiously, and then exchanged knowing looks, as if they thought that might rather be wishful thinking on Fancy’s part, but neither of them said anything.

Strange looked to Morse, then, his expression partly hopeful and partly regretful that he was his one remaining option.

“What about you, matey? You’ve got time for a quick nip down at the Lamb and Flag, don’t you?” Strange asked.

“Oh,” Morse said. “I can’t. I have plans.”

Jakes huffed a laugh. “What _plans?_ Going to sit up in your room with your records?” He lit a fresh cigarette and took a long draw. “Go on, Morse. You ought to go. It’s not like you’ll get the chance again anytime in the near future.”

“You really ought to come along,” Strange said, cajolingly. “Do you good. You look a bit worn thin, matey.”

“Yeah, Morse,” Jakes said. “After all, this might be your lucky night. This chess match is all anyone can talk about. Perhaps the girl might be impressed by your role as liaison to all the big wheels. Perhaps she might overlook what a queer duck you are.”

Morse startled at that.

_Queer duck?_

He wasn’t referring to . . .

“Come on, matey. Be a bit sociable for once and help a fellow out, won’t you? Janet says she’ll cancel rather than leave her cousin sitting at home.”

Morse felt as if he was caught between Scylla and Charybdis. He had a horror of going to the pub with strangers, of trying to make the sort of small talk required of him in such situations. He had always failed spectacularly those few times that Joan had tried to take him out with her friends.

But, on the other hand, did it seem odd to them, how often he just went about with Tony? It certainly was an open secret that he was awkward as hell . . . but . . .

Queer duck? Was it a coincidence that Jakes should happen upon that phrase? Did Jakes think there was something else there, something between them? He and Tony?

Not that there was, really.

But, at the same time, it wasn’t as if there wasn’t.

And . . .

Before Morse could think his dilemma through, the door to Thursday’s office opened, and the Inspector came out into the bay of desks, his expression as dark and as dour as ever it had been these past weeks, so much so that it seemed as if his narrowed eyes looked right through the lot of them as he passed.

“Well, Morse. Home time,” he said, tersely, adjusting his hat more firmly onto his head. 

“Oh,” Morse said. “Well, I . . . I . . . ”

“Well, what?” Thursday snapped.

“He can’t,” Jakes said, a wry smile playing around the corners of his mouth. “He’s going to go make up a four. With Strange.”

Thursday paused at that and raised his eyebrows in interest. “That right?” he asked. “You mean . . . with a girl?”

“Yes, with a girl,” Morse said. 

“My girl’s cousin in town,” Strange began, “and she doesn’t want to leave her home without a date . . .”

“Well, that’s fine, then,” Thursday said, looking pleased as Punch.

Morse chanced a glance at Jakes, who could barely conceal his amusement.

At any other time, Morse would be happy to see a bit of light in Thursday’s stern, weathered face, considering he’d been in such a churlish mood of late over the disappearance of Joan.

But need he look _so_ delighted? Did he have to make his going out with a girl look to be _such_ a cause for celebration?

Now Morse had no _choice_ but to go, if nothing else than to throw some dust in the air, to diffuse the awkwardness of it all.

To get that knowing look off of Jakes’ face.

To top all, the ray of hopefulness in Thursday’s expression was short-lived, anyway. In another moment, the Inspector’s face darkened, as if he was realizing that Morse’s absence meant one less person to fill the empty spaces at home, one less person to help fill the spaces where Joan should be. If Sam was going out too, Mr. and Mrs. Thursday might find themselves alone together, with only the sharp, unspoken tension—the disagreement about what to do about their lost daughter—between them.

“Right,” Thursday said. “Well. Have a good time. I’ll see you tonight.”

He checked his hat once more and then headed out of the office, and Morse, Jakes, Strange and Fancy followed in his wake, Fancy snapping off the lights as they filed out.

Morse was halfway down the stairs when it all caught up with him—when he fully realized that he was actually getting roped into this, that there wasn’t really any way out.

“I forgot my coat,” Morse blurted. “I’ll just be a moment.”

“Coat’s right there. You’re holding it, matey,” Strange protested.

“I . . . . I forgot something else,” he invented wildly.

“Well, all right, then. Hurry up, though. I don’t want to be late.”

Morse turned and headed back up the stairs, taking them two at a time, his footfalls echoing in the hushed and shadowed space. Then he went into the darkened offices and flipped on the lights.

He picked up the phone and half-collapsed onto the corner of his desk, cradling the heavy apparatus in his lap as he dialed Tony’s number.

How was he going to explain? He wasn’t quite sure himself how he ended up in this position.

He waited, listening to the incessant ringing on the end of the line, hoping Tony hadn’t already left for the Thursdays’.

Finally, Tony answered.

“LSO 6849. Donn here.”

“Tony? It’s Morse.”

“Morse,” Tony said. “I was just on my way to collect you.”

“Well, don’t,” Morse said. “I . . . I can’t go.”

“What? You’re just telling me this now? It was your idea to go to the thing.”

“I know. But I can’t. Ummm. Work,” he said.

Tony snorted. “When is it anything else? All right, then. Have a nice investigation.”

“Mmmmmm,” Morse said.

“Talk to you later,” Tony said. 

“Mmmmmm,” Morse said.

And then he hung up the phone, feeling uneasy, feeling the hollowness of the lie as it settled down into a spot somewhere behind the buckle of his belt, somewhere deep in his gut.

****

Morse and Strange walked down the pavement, side by side, through the rustle of scattered brown leaves scuttling along the cement, and up to the door of the Lamb and Flag. Strange pulled the heavy door open, and Morse followed him inside the warm pub, past the carved wooden bar gleaming darkly with glasses that hung along the ceiling above the counter.

They chose a booth in front of the window, not far from the hearth, where a roaring fire flickered orange in the dim room; it was cozy space, rich with the scent of beer and strumming with the murmur of conversation and the occassional clinking of glass.

Morse slid into his seat, and for a long while he sat, silently considering the damp stains of condensation rings on the table, a sinking feeling growing steadily inside him.

He needed a drink.

“I’m going to get a bitter,” Morse announced.

“Bitter?” Strange asked incredulously. “If you want to be with it, it’s got to be lager.”

Morse grimaced. “Is that what they swill up at division? Or down at the lodge? And here I thought Jakes was bad with that muck. I thought you were a Farmer’s man.”

“Look, Morse, a word of advice. If you want to get along with the birds, you need to make more of an effort to get yourself up to date.”

Morse scowled. What the hell was that supposed to mean? Did Strange have any idea how hard he tried, trying to fill in the blank spaces of those five years?

An expression of distaste crossed Strange’s face, then, as if he realized too late how his words might be interpreted.

“I don’t mean, that, matey. I mean, you have to know how to make conversation.”

“I _do_ know how to make conversation.”

“I don’t mean discussing the merits of Waggoner over Verdi. I mean, you . . . .”

“Wagner,” Morse corrected.

“What?”

“It’s Wagner. And the name is German. The W is pronounced as a V.”

Strange made a face. “Well. Case in point. You needn’t correct a person on every little thing.”

“But that wasn’t a little thing. You completely mispronounced the name of a well-known composer. Is it better that I let you blithely continue on in ignorance? Surely that isn’t any kindness, is it?”

Strange took a deep breath, as if struggling to maintain his patience. “The long story short of it is: You want to keep it light. You know. Small talk.”

“Mmmmmm,” Morse said.

“And what’s more, it’s not good manners, us getting a drink, now, is it?” Strange asked. “We want to wait for the girls, don’t we?”

“It might not be good manners as far as the girls are concerned, but I’m sure the owner feels differently. I’m sure he doesn’t want us just sitting here in his pub all night, taking up a table, without ordering a drink,” Morse said.

But Strange ignored him. Instead, he looked to the door, where two young women were coming into to the pub. One of them put a hand to a big blonde curl at her shoulder, as if to tidy it from the early autumn wind outside, as if to make sure it still had a bit of a bounce.

“Hello, Jim,” she called.

“Evening, Janet,” Strange replied.

Morse widened his eyes. Something odd seemed to happen to Strange’s voice on those three syllables—suddenly, it waxed warmer, richer, more mellow, like the voice of a radio announcer.

“This is my cousin, Allison,” Janet said. 

A dark-haired girl at her side, with a blue headband and a heart-shaped face, smiled, revealing two soft dimples.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello, Allison,” Strange said. “This is my friend, Morse.”

Morse made an elaborate double-take at that. He had expected Strange to introduce him as a colleague. _Were_ they friends? Did Strange consider them to be?

“Morse?” Allison laughed, sliding into the booth. “Morse what?”

“Just Morse,” Morse said.

“Morse?” Janet asked, taking a place beside her. “Is that your Christian name, or your surname?”

And there it was.

Was it any wonder, honestly, that he avoided situations like this?

“My surname,” Morse said.

“Awwww. Don’t stand on ceremony, love,” Janet said.

“He doesn’t use his Christian name,” Strange explained. “He finds it a bit embarrassing.”

And why on earth did Strange say that? Nothing piqued curiosity more than forbidden fruit.

Sure enough, Allison looked at him with fresh interest, as if determined to have it out of him.

“Come on, then. It can’t be so bad, can it?” Allison said. “What is it? What does it begin with, at least?”

“E,” Morse said.

“Edward?” Janet asked.

Allison tapped Janet lightly on the arm. “Don’t be daft, Jan. Why would he fret over a name like Edward?”

“Mostly, it’s just E for embarrassment,” Morse said, mournfully.

And then both girls dissolved into giggles, as if he had said the most amusing thing they had ever heard, even though he had been speaking quite earnestly.

It was all unfathomable.

Strange gave him an encouraging look, as if to say. “Nice one, matey.”

Morse took a deep breath. Perhaps this would not be so very terrible.

“So. What is it that you like to talk about?” Morse asked.

Simply coming out and getting the issue on the table, so to speak, seemed to be the best, the wisest course. Why waste time spinning around, flitting from topic to topic?

But, oddly enough, the question seemed only to leave a tense silence in its wake, as if a gray cloud had settled over the booth. The three of them looked at one another blankly. Strange cleared his throat, as if he had said something terribly indecent.

It was just as Morse feared.

He was a conversational black hole.

“Well. . . .” Strange began, as though considering the matter.

There was another pause.

“Why don’t we get a drink?” Strange said. 

And Morse snorted. That was what he had said right off, wasn’t it?

Once they settled back down with their glasses, Morse resolved to do his best to try again. Although, this time, he decided to wait for someone else to get the conversational ball rolling.

“Did you hear about the robot? That’s going to play the chess champion?” Allison said.

“It’s not a robot,” Morse said.

“It is, yeah,” Janet said. “It’s going to play chess. Against that Russian. What’s-his-name. The chess champion.”

“Morse is going to be there at the match,” Strange began, his voice waxing low and mellow again. . . . “He’s going to be representing the Oxford City . . .”

“No, it’s not a robot,” Morse insisted, cutting across him. “It’s a computer. A robot is a machine that can replicate human movements to perform tasks. A computer can be instructed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations, or to process and store information. But it can’t actually interact with its environment.” 

Janet took a thoughtful sip of her glass of red table wine. “How’s it going to move the pieces then?” she asked. “How’s it going to play chess?”

“It’s merely going to give Dr. Ellsworth instructions. He’ll be the one to actually move the pieces,” Morse said.

“Oh,” Allison said. “Is that all? That doesn’t sound like all that big a thing. I thought it was a robot.”

“Mmmmmm,” Morse replied, humming in agreement.

Well, she was right. It wasn’t all that remarkable. Feed it data, it could calculate probabilities. It was just an overgrown calculator, really. Actually . . . when Morse thought about it . . .

“Actually, it isn’t a robot in any sense of the word,” Morse said, unable to keep the quirk of a smug smile from off his face. “It doesn’t work. So by definition, it’s not a robot.”

“How’s that matey?” Strange asked.

“When I was there, it seemed that two of the researchers, a Dr. Updike and a Dr. Maxwell, couldn’t get it to work properly. And robot means _to work._ From _rabotat’_. To work. In Russian.”

Morse laughed at the irony of it all. JCN was nothing but a mess of tubes and wire. Of course, it was no substitute for the human mind. 

The others didn’t seem to get the joke, but it was funny as hell, it really was. And Morse was still laughing to himself as he went to reach for his beer.

And then his laughter died in his mouth, cut short, as he felt the blood drain right from his face.

Across the crowded pub, by the front door, Tony was there, looking at him as if he had never seen him before.

Morse swallowed.

Tony frowned then, and shook his head faintly, as if he wasn’t surprised to find Morse there, after all, laughing in a booth, just under an hour since he had cancelled on him. He turned away and went to join a group who had gathered at a large round table in the corner, a group who Morse dimly recognized as some of the Lake Silence crowd with whom Tony occasionally played cricket.

“I don’t know any Russian,” Janet was saying, and then she was eyeing Morse doubtfully, as though he were somehow suspect for knowing such a thing. “Nor would I want to. They’re all a bunch of Reds, aren’t they, the Russians?”

Morse found he could only register what she said dimly, as his brain was suddenly filled with a low and sickening buzz, a hum of confusion circling around what had just happened—what was happening, even now—between him and Tony.

Eventually, the words caught up with him, and Morse frowned. “You can’t possibly say you would willingly abandon a culture that produced Tolstoy and Rimsky-Korsakov and Rachmaninov simply because you don’t agree with their current political regime?” he said.

Strange cleared this throat.

“Have you heard that new song, ‘Jennifer Sometimes?’” he asked.

“Oh, yeah, it’s quite catchy,” Allison said. “I just bought the 45. It’s got Nick on the sleeve. He’s so dreamy. My flatmate says John and Paul are better looking, but I don’t at all agree. I told her, I said, Meg, ‘We’ll just have to agree to disagree. That’s all.’” 

But Morse could no longer keep up with their conversation. Instead, he couldn’t help but chance another glance at Tony, taking in the back of his perfectly-cut jacket, taking in the way that he sat, his poised, upper-crust Lake Silence posture so at ease, and yet, at the same time, seeming to radiate with a distinct, upper-crust chill.

How could he explain? He hadn’t meant to lie. It just seemed easier, more expedient at the time, than explaining it all, right when Strange was waiting for him on the stairs.

For the rest of the night, Morse gave into it, to that sinking feeling in his chest—gave up completely on the task of trying to keep up with what the others were on about. Nor did he dare to look up again, lest Tony sense it, lest he turn around and meet his eyes.

Instead, he said nothing, but only kept his gaze trained on his beer, as its volume steadily decreased in its glass.

****

When Morse got home, he wanted nothing more than to go straight upstairs to his room, to forget that the awful day and the even more awful night had ever happened.

But instead, he found that Thursday was still up, sitting in his chair in the den with the evening edition of _The Oxford Mail_ , as if lying in wait for him.

“Home, Morse?” he called. “How did it go?” 

Oh, not this.

He must be joking.

Morse paused in the doorway of the den.

“How did _what_ go?” he replied, dully.

Thursday made an impatient face. “You know what. How did you get on? With the girl?”

“Swimmingly. We’ll be sending out our engagement announcements any day now,” Morse said. “Look for yours in the post.”

Thursday scowled. “Don’t give me any of that sauce. It was a simple question.”

“I made a hash of things. What did you expect? It was all a disaster.”

Morse felt absolutely sick inside, truth be told. Not only had he let down Strange, and completely laid waste to some poor girl’s evening, but Tony . . .

He couldn’t get the expression on Tony’s face out of his mind.

Thursday, in the meanwhile, looked as irritated as an old bull bothered by mayflies, and he sighed sharply through his nose.

“What?” Morse asked.

“I don’t know, Morse. I just thought you might be a little more open-minded. It was you who said you needn’t rule out half of the population. If you would just put that big brain of yours onto it, I’m sure you could make a little progress, getting on better with people. You don’t want to end up alone, a crusty old bachelor, do you?”

They were getting down to it now, the fact that Inspector Thursday didn’t approve of his friendship with Tony. It was even worse, his bringing all of this up now, now that it most probably was a moot point, now that Tony most likely was through with him, anyway.

Who needed it, Thursday's interference? 

Morse raised himself to his full height. “Or I could just try to accept the way things are now,” he said. “Proverbs 16:19.”

“What’s that supposed to mean, then?” Thursday asked dryly. “I don’t have my Bible right at hand, just now, funnily enough.”

“Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall,” Morse quoted.

“How’s that?”

“It means you shouldn’t expect too much.”

“Who told you that?” Thursday said sharply.

The honest answer was his father, from but from the look on Thursday’s face, Morse felt that the Inspector had assumed as much already. Better to not bring up another sore subject, when Thursday was already in such a bad temper.

Besides, it didn’t make any sense, really, Thursday's objection to Tony. If Tony had been coming by to collect Joan for concerts all this while, he and Mrs. Thursday most likely would have thought they’d won the pools.

Or no. Perhaps that wasn’t so, either. Class prejudices would almost certainly make someone like Thursday, who had worked hard all of his life, naturally suspicious of someone like Tony, who . . . 

Well.

Who really hadn’t.

But still...

“I don’t know what you’ve got against him,” Morse said. 

A pained look settled itself across Thursday’s face.

“I suppose, considering the state of my own family, I’m not one to talk. And I hate to speak to a man disrespectfully of his father, but, all that rubbish he told you, Morse, you should know . . .”

“No,” Morse said. “I’m not talking about my father. I mean Tony.”

“Oh,” Thursday said, now looking even more uncomfortable.

“I don’t have anything against Donn,” Thursday said. “It just certainly would be easier for you, if, well . . . Well. It’s just. You needn’t settle for the first person you think will have you. That’s all I’m saying.”

Morse huffed a laugh. He didn't know the half of it.

“Don’t I?” 

“Of course, not. After all, you were happy with your fiancé, weren’t you? You could be just as happy again, that’s all I’m saying.”

Susan.

Was he honestly going to throw the specter of Susan in his face now? After all of these years?

No wonder he drove Joan to distraction.

It was difficult to put into words just how painful it was, watching Joan throw away with both hands the one thing he himself had long ago given up hoping for. Even at the age of twelve, standing at his mother’s graveside, Morse had no illusions as to what his future would hold.

But then again, every now and then, he could see it, he could see how Joan might feel as if she had no choice, if she wanted to make it clear that she was her own person. She had no choice but to . . .

“No wonder that . . .” Morse began.

But that was too harsh a thing to say, too. And so he cut the sentence short, bit it back before he said something he’d regret.

Thursday, however, seemed to sense it in the offing.

“No wonder _what?_ ” he asked.

“Nothing,” Morse said.

“Go ahead and say it, constable. It’s not as if you ever hold back at the nick.”

But Morse shook his head. He just didn’t have it in his heart to fault Thursday for the crime of being perhaps _too_ involved, _too_ invested in his children’s lives, not when his own life might have turned out so very differently, not when he might have been spared so much, if his only own father and Gwen had shown even a trifle of his concern over his whereabouts.

Even if they had bothered to have filed a missing persons report, it most certainly would have come out that he had never reported for the duty bus.

Morse looked at Thursday, and no, it was hard to fault him overmuch, for the crime of perhaps caring a bit too deeply, too intensely. He was the man, after all, who had given him a second chance, who had taken a gamble on him when he was a stranger, who had taken him from the whiteness of the hospital and had brought him to his home, to his family. 

“I’m . . . I’m sorry you’re disappointed with me," Morse said, at last. “It was all . . .”

“ . . . I didn’t say that. I just think you shouldn’t be so quick to be disappointed in yourself, is all. I just think . . .”

And, of course, Morse was disappointed with himself. He had found the one person willing to wait for him, to be patient with him in all of his twisting and muddled confusion, and he had ruined it.

Of course, he had ruined it. Was there ever any doubt that he would? He knew it, all along, that his very existence was tainted, that he was fated to break anything he tried to hold, and . . . 

“ . . . It was all a catastrophe, all right? Start to finish,” Morse said. "There’s no point hashing over it. I’ll be lucky if Strange is talking to me in the morning as it is. I’m off to bed. Night.”

“Night,” Thursday said, grudgingly, as if at last willing to let it go.

Morse went up the stairs slowly and then trudged down the hall, glancing into Joan’s empty room as he passed. Mrs. Thursday had kept the room utterly pristine in her daughter’s absence, as if she was expecting her to return at any moment. Each morning, she tied back the lavender curtains to let in the light, dusted the colored glass perfume bottles on the dresser, and, every now and then, she filled a vase that stood on the nightstand with fresh flowers from the garden. Morse couldn’t help but to feel another pang in his heart at the thought of it; he couldn’t help but wonder how long he had been gone before his father and Gwen had begun to use his room to store spare lumber.

Two months?

Two weeks?

He stopped in at the bath to brush his teeth—there were only four toothbrushes left there in the holder by the sink, as Joan's was now missing; She had left all of the mementos of her girlhood behind—the photos of school friends tucked in the mirror, her snow globe and her music box and stuffed animals—even the tiger that Morse had won for her long ago at the fair lay abandoned at the foot of her bed—but she had taken her toothbrush, at least.

Morse washed his face with cold water, as if to break the feeling of melancholy and loss that had settled over him. Then he went to his room, undressed, pulled on his pajamas, and stretched out on the bed.

It occurred to him, then, as he looked about his room, that Mrs. Thursday had once kept a similar vigil for him, as she now did with Joan. When he had finally made it back to the house after the arrest of Mason Gull, his room was just as he had left it; it was clear that it had been aired and dusted while he was gone, and the laundry he had left in the hamper the night before his abduction had been washed and left waiting for him, fresh and folded on his dresser.

Even his murals, the Thursdays had left entirely alone. They might have thought it the perfect chance to paint them over, to restore some sense of normalcy to their house. After all, Morse’s own father would never have allowed such eccentricity under his roof in the first place.

Morse reached over and snapped off the light on his bedside table, and then lay back against the pillows, allowing his eyes to roam over the paintings on his walls, now shadowed in darkness. The painted vines seemed almost to glow in the moonlight from the window, twisting and turning as if taking on bright new lives of their own, the trees reaching with turning branches deep into an overarching blue sky. The blowing grasses and blossoms, too, appeared to move in the quivering light of the moon, as if just on the verge of taking breath.

It seemed odd to him now, that he had painted a garden thus. It was all a little _too_ surreal, a little _too_ fantastical, perhaps.

He could remember it only vaguely, that short-circuit of pure joy he had felt when he had painted the room—it had been like a rush of unconquerable and unbelievable happiness, letting it all out, all that had been contained for so long within the span of those white walls, all that had been contained beneath the crush of the numbers.

There was a part of him, even at the time, that knew it was an odd thing to do—painting a dreamworld of a garden on the walls of a stranger’s spare bedroom—but that was somehow, too, part of the sheer wonder of it: it had been a little thrill, knowing that he was breaking the rules, acting in a manner that never would have been tolerated at that other house, where that man's silent command was law.

Mrs. Thursday, by contrast, surely must have noticed him, going up and down the stairs to the shed, bringing up more and more dented and stray cans of paint, as his creation grew more and more elaborate, but she pretended to busy herself at the sink, as if giving him tacit permission, as if to let him know that it was his room now as far as she was concerned, and he might paint it however he would.

He could go upstairs and downstairs and outside and back in again, and she didn’t mind at all; he could go anywhere he wanted, and his heart beat in his chest with an odd sort of euphoria. Wasn’t it amazing?

But now he knew that, no, something had been wrong, something had been terribly wrong; it had all been lies and more lies at that man’s house. Now he knew that he never should have come to that, now he realized that the simple act of being allowed to go downstairs should never have seemed so amazing at all.

Slowly, Morse began to close his heavy eyes, but, as he did, he found his gaze lingering over one spiraling bird, one that seemed to blaze from out of the surrounding leaves in a sunburst of feathers.

He could remember, only vaguely, painting it there—could remember himself only as some other and unfamiliar version of himself, as a man without words, adding each feather with a careful stroke of the brush, while all the while a dizzying sense of freedom coursed through his veins.

He wasn’t sure when that understanding, that memory of how he had felt when he had painted the mural had begun to fade, but ...

But faded, it had.

Whether that was a good thing, or a bad thing, Morse wasn't sure.

He closed his eyes, then, his thoughts turning at once from the scenes depicted on his painting to another, very different scene—to one of a day when he had sat in the rain, on the sober and muted green and gray shores of Lake Silence, next to Tony.

And then he remembered Tony’s face at the pub just a few hours earlier, and that look that was somehow at once both disappointed and disinterested in equal measure. 

He furrowed his brow and rolled over, searching for a cooler spot on the pillow.

****

The next morning, at breakfast, Thursday seemed to have forgotten their conversation of the night before. Or perhaps he had simply truly decided to let it go. Or perhaps he was distracted, still hell-bent on taking some of his bad temper out on County.

Whichever it was, Morse was grateful.

As soon as Morse came downstairs and settled into his chair in the corner, Thursday began at once to regale him with his thoughts on the Laxman case, as if they were already down at Cowley Station.

Sam’s new job required him to go in earlier to the office, and in the absence of Joan as well, the Inspector had seemed to relax his old hall stand rule of late, and had taken to speaking to Morse, albeit in low murmurs, about their current case over toast and tea at the breakfast table. 

“Knew there was something not right about the Laxman case,” he muttered, darkly, taking up the butter dish. “Right from the off, felt it in my water.”

“What about County?” Morse asked. “Anything telling in their files?”

“Not really. It appears to be a textbook case. Open and shut.” Thursday snorted with derision, as if he didn’t believe such a thing in the slightest. “Since when has _County_ ever done a textbook anything?”

In the meanwhile, Mrs. Thursday was moving about the house—going from the dining room to the kitchen to fetch a butter knife, then returning and slamming it on the table—with an impatience that bordered on ferocity. It was clear she was unhappy with them.

Morse felt his stomach, already twisted with thoughts of Tony, clench more tightly with the realization of it, so that he almost felt slightly lightheaded. It was like a painful echo of all the mornings he had endured at the grim brick house in Lincolnshire, when Gwen had moved about the kitchen so. Not saying anything specific, not telling him what it was he was doing wrong, exactly. Just going about her business in a way that let him know that he was a complete and utter nuisance. That his very presence was enough to put a damper on her morning. 

And again, just like the night before, Morse found himself lost in the memories of someone who seemed almost an entirely different person than himself—a gangly teenager who sat a very different table, trying to sink within himself, trying to make himself smaller, as if to escape his stepmother's sharp notice.

So many times, Morse had wished that Gwen would just let her anger show, yell at him, tell him just what it was he was doing that annoyed her so—anything to spare him from the dark looks and the sighs and the pointed silences that left him writhing with anxiety, with that unending sense of nameless dread.

Morse shook his head, as if to dispel the memory, and picked up his toast. But when he took a bite, immediately, his stomach rolled over. It seemed to stick in his throat, right in the back, as though it might gag him.

He swallowed painfully and took a gulp of tea.

Thursday, for his part, seemed to be determined not to rise to Mrs. Thursday's bait. Clearly, they must have had words that morning.

The doorbell rang with a shrill bleat, sounding so much more loudly in the house than it had done previously— than it had on those mornings, just months ago, when all five of them had been at the table, chatting about the upcoming day, back when Joan and Sam bickered over a filched record, back when Mrs. Thursday hummed to herself as she flipped the eggs.

“That will be Jakes,” Thursday said. He pushed back his chair. He didn’t bother asking Mrs. Thursday about his sandwiches.

Morse took one last gulp of tea and gathered up his car coat from where he had slung it over his chair, eager to get to the station. It was all so wrong, the tension in the house. He was keen to escape it.

When he got to the door, however, he found he couldn’t bear it, couldn’t bear to leave the house that had become his home in the same manner in which he had once skulked out the kitchen door from the house in Lincolnshire.

“Goodbye, Mrs. Thursday,” Morse called out, hoping to break the strain that had fallen between them, before they left for the day.

His words seemed to resonate in the empty hall. There was nothing but pointed silence from the kitchen. It was an awful sort of déjà vu, a bitter reminder of those early days when he had called out so to his stepmother, back when he thought he might at least be friends of sorts with Gwen.

Morse felt drained; it was contagious, it was a sort of damage that he carried with him wherever he went, that he must have carried with him to this house. He swallowed roughly and made once more for the door, but Thursday blocked his way, considering him, a shrewd expression on his face.

“Win?” he called. “Win? We’re leaving! Win?”

He frowned, then, and took a few steps back into the hall. “Win? What’s the matter with you, you can’t say Cheerio to Morse?”

A pan slammed in the kitchen with a metallic clang, and then Mrs. Thursday was there, in the doorway, angrily wiping her hands on a tea towel.

_“Wrong?_ I’ll tell you what’s wrong. Listen to the pair of you. All the morning on about this Laxman business.”

She turned, then, and looked her husband full in the face. “You can find a man who has been missing for five years, but you won’t look for your own daughter!”

Her voice broke on the last word, almost into a sob, and something in Morse broke with it. Her words hurt, yes, but they brought something of a rush of relief as well, and some of the tightness there in his gut slowly unclenched.

Mrs. Thursday spun on her heel and stalked back into the kitchen with quick strides, but it seemed, too, that her shoulders were quivering.

She was angry, yes. But mostly, she was desolate.

And it was easier for her to be angry with them then to let them see her cry. 

Morse watched her as she went. As difficult as it was, realizing the depths of her sorrow—and remembering anew his place in it—it was so much easier knowing why she was angry.

It wasn’t his entire existence that she found unacceptable. Just the piece of him that played a part in the disappearance her daughter.

Thursday looked at him, and sighed heavily, and then opened the front door. 

******

They found Nigel Warren just outside of Hertford College, where brown and dry leaves were blowing across the stone courtyard, not far from the arching Bridge of Sighs. 

He was standing at the top of the steps, all shabby coat and unkempt beard, brandishing a Bible and shouting at the top of his lungs to all who happened to pass by.

“And the first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood!”

Morse could barely suppress a snort.

Because that was the flip side of the whole conundrum, wasn’t it? Wasn’t Warren an example of precisely the sort of stupidity that might lead humanity into the fallacy of believing that all the answers lay in new technologies? In clear-cut and relentlessly logical machines? 

The human mind was not a hollow thing, it was not a shadow, it was not an automaton. It was free to soar beyond the constraints of mere pragmatism, into flights of feeling and understanding that led to the creation of art and music and poetry.

“And they were cast upon the earth. And a third part of trees was burnt up and all the green grass was burnt up!” 

But that also meant it was free to spew complete balderdash.

“Nigel Warren?” Thursday asked, flashing his warrant card as he approached the man. “City Police.”

Warren’s face sobered immediately; he looked almost frightened.

“About five years ago, you hitched a lift off Dr. Matthew Laxman, going out Bramford Way,” Thursday said. 

“I gave a statement at the time,” Warren replied.

“To County, yes, but not to us,” Morse said. “We’re reviewing the case.”

“Then you’ll know I had an alibi.”

Morse grimaced. He certainly was quick of the mark with that.

“Did Laxman say anything about going to Bramford Mere?” Morse asked. 

“I thought he just said to Bramford. He was in a pretty bad mood. I think some woman had gotten his back up.”

“Did he say who?”

"His wife, I took it.”

“Right,” Thursday said. "Well, if anything comes back to you, we’re at Cowley Nick."

“Right,” Warren said, and then he ducked his head, in an odd, obsequious little bow, as they turned to head off on their way. 

And Morse felt for certain, that, there was a man who knew more than what he was saying. 

Morse was mulling over Warren's responses, when Thursday started up on a veritable drumroll of commands.

“Get a hold of a copy of the missing persons poster. And have a patrol car run you out to Bramford. Ask around. See if you can jog any memories," he said.

Morse frowned.

Oh, hell.

Was he really to spend all day long, wandering about some remote village, going door to door with a flyer, with nothing but his own wretched thoughts for company?

Something of his unhappiness must have shown in his face, because Thursday rounded on him at once. 

“What?” he snapped. 

“Well," Morse said. "We’re going through a lot of trouble over a pair of glasses, aren’t we? I mean, if it had been Laxman’s _body_ in the mere, but . . . it wasn’t. Five years. If there was anything to be found, County would have found it.”

“County couldn’t find their arse with both hands on a map," Thursday snorted. "This time we’re gonna make sure it gets done right. Meet me at the church around five.”

And, with that, he stalked off down the pavement.

It was absolutely the last thing that Morse wanted, the last way he wanted to spend the day—on his own in a strange place, with nothing much to do but to dwell on all the many ways his new life—his new family— was slowly falling to pieces around him.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Morse searches for leads in the odd village of Bramford....

Morse stepped out of the blue and white patrol car and then watched with regret as it pulled away, leaving him to stand alone on the side of the road, right on the main street that ran into Bramford.

It was a quaint little place that lay winding out before him, as picturesque as a postcard, with tidy stone homes all in an orderly row, shops with red clay-tile roofs and outdoor stands selling loaves of golden bread and fresh vegetables, and a half-timbered pub, painted in ivory and green, with a weather-worn sign hanging over the door reading, “The Hanged Man.”

It _should_ have been a nice, quiet little village, Bramford.

Pity it wasn’t, really.

In the middle of a large green, a group of Morris dancers, dressed in rustic white and earth-toned costumes, jumped and leapt about, pounding and smacking long sticks together with a primal, almost barbaric energy that sounded every bit as discordantly in Morse’s ears as one of those rock "songs" that Fancy so enjoyed— and which he subjected Morse to whenever it was his turn to choose the radio station in the patrol car.

Thump-thump-THUMP

Thump-thump-THUMP

Morse turned away, half-rolling his eyes, and, plunged his hands deep into the pockets of his gray car coat as he continued on, down the lonely road. A light autumn wind had flurried up, ruffling at his hair as he went. Summer was fading. It was the turning of the year once more. Soon, there would be hoarfrost and bonfires. Soon, there would be no more picnics out at Lake Silence. Only a long winter’s loneliness.

But there was no time to think of that now.

No time to think of Tony.

Up ahead, at a produce stand, a woman in an oversized cardigan was standing amidst brick walls covered with ivy, sorting out bins and baskets, tidying up a display of carrots and of cabbages, of red and yellow onions and of dusty, brown potatoes.

“Good afternoon,” he called out to her, flashing his warrant card as he introduced himself. “I’m Detective Constable Morse, City Police.”

She brushed her hands together, as she stepped forward, out from behind the stand.

“You’re a long way off, aren’t you, my dear?” she observed.

Hmmmmm.

He certainly was.

“I’m looking into the disappearance of a man called Dr. Matthew Laxman,” Morse said. “He went missing from the area about five years ago.”

“Yep. I remember,” she replied. “The botanist.”

She pronounced the final word a bit oddly, as if it had quotation marks around it.

“Well . . . what can you tell me about Dr. Laxman?” Morse asked.

“Oh, he was all about Bramford that summer. Sixty-two, like you said. Making some sort of “study,” he said.”

“In the summer,” Morse clarified. “But you didn't happen to see him here during the month of September?”

“Nope,” she said. “Told the police at the time as much.”

“Well . . .” Morse began uncertainly. “I just wondered . . . if you might have remembered anything in the meantime.”

“Sorry,” she said. “No.”

And then, she turned away, just like that, and returned to her work, rearranging loaves of butter-glazed and braided bread.

There was an awkward silence.

“Well,” Morse said, to her turned back. “Thank you.”

Another awkward pause ensued. It was a closed-off village, that much Morse gathered. No one seemed much inclined to talk.

It was a shame, actually, that Fancy was so tied up in those car thefts. Perhaps they should have traded assignments. Fancy, he was sure, would flash a grin, ask something innocuous, get the conversation rolling.

It was just like Strange had said, wasn’t it? At the pub?

It was all about small talk.

Well. There was no reason he couldn’t pull such a thing off just as well as Fancy.

Morse cast about for something to say, and of course, the first thing his mind lit upon was that merciless pounding.

“What’s with the, uh, Morrismen?” Morse asked.

“Practicing their figures for Saturday,” the woman said, now slightly more interested in what he had to say. “Second harvest. Balance of the year.”

“The autumnal equinox,” Morse said.

“That’s right. Light and dark, dark and light in perfect harmony.”

Morse grimaced. That was a fanciful answer to say the least. Perhaps it was best he move on, try someone else.

“Well,” Morse said, turning away. “Thanks again.” 

“Not at all, my dear,” the woman replied. “Goddess bless thee.” 

Morse stopped in his tracks and then turned ‘round and considered her, raising his eyebrows.

Was the whole village taken up by it, then?

Surely not.

Two hours later, however, Morse was forced to conclude that, evidently, it was.

Everywhere Morse inquired it was the same. Yes, they had seen Dr. Laxman around and about that summer. No, they hadn’t seen him in September. Why was he asking? Everyone had already told the police five years ago that they hadn’t seen Laxman during the week in question. No one had any interest in trying to remember any stray detail they might have forgotten.

The “balance of the year”, the festival, the Morris dancers, all the trappings of their ancient pagan rites—that seemed to be all anyone here could talk about.

There had to be _someone_ around the place who wasn’t stark raving bonkers.

Morse walked away from the main street, then, down through a grove of trees, away from the noise of the Morrismen, away from their infernal and incessant pounding.

Thump-thump-THUMP

Thump-thump-THUMP 

Thump-thump-THUMP

Instead, he strolled down through the hedgerows, to where the terrible noise was replaced at last by the tremor of fading birdsong, following a winding path that led to a row of small brick houses.

In front of one, a woman with long blonde hair was hanging out white sheets on a laundry line with a crisp efficiency that led Morse to hope, that here, at last, he might find a sensible person.

She must have heard his step through the grass behind her, because she turned around the moment he approached, almost as if she had been expecting him. 

“Oh,” she said. “Hello.”

And Morse could hear it at once in her voice, in just those three syllables—a certain drawn-out flatness.

American.

Morse sighed.

Surely, she would find herself an outsider in a village like this—she wouldn’t have heard all of the gossip, wouldn’t be privy to any odd whispers of rumor or hint of innuendo. It was quite possible that she might not even have _been_ in Britain at all when Laxman disappeared.

“Detective Constable Morse, Oxford City Police,” he said, holding up, for what felt the hundredth time that day, his warrant card.

“You wouldn’t happen to have been here, in Bramford, in ‘62, would you?” he asked.

“Sixty-two?” she asked.

“Yes,” Morse said.

She furrowed her brow, as though giving the matter some thought. “I don’t know if I could quite say _where_ I was in ’62,” she said, at last. Then she clipped another clothespin onto the corner of the sheet and tilted her head, considering him.

“Bit early in the day for metaphysics, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Hmmmmm,” Morse said.

Well.

Perhaps there was something in the water in this odd little village and even the American woman had caught it.

Perhaps it was best to cut right to the chase.

“Have you heard of a botanist called Matthew Laxman?” Morse asked.

“What?” she asked, then, seemingly delighted. “Are you already fishing for spoilers?”

Morse blinked. 

What had she said?

Spoilers? He supposed that a man gone missing for five years, a case possibly bungled by County, was something spoilt, something rotten.

It must be some idiom common to her native land.

“You know,” she said. “If you want to talk to someone who knows all about Bramford, you ought to ask Mrs. Chattox. She’s this old woman, who lives down in the woods?”

“Ah,” Morse said. “Right.”

“But be careful,” she added. “She’s sort of crazy.”

Morse repressed the urge to snort. Who in Bramford wasn’t half-mad?

Present company included.

“Right,” Morse said.

“No. I’m serious,” the woman insisted, widening her eyes. “She’s got a _gun.”_

“Errr… right,” Morse said, slowly backing away. “Well. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she said. “Good luck.”

Morse thrust his hands back into the pockets of his car coat and continued down the winding path that led into the woods.

It _couldn’t_ be as dire as all that.

Americans and their tall tales and their Wild West, thinking everyone went about “packing heat” at all times. It was all quite fanciful, really.

Perhaps in old Mrs. Chattox’s house, he’d find an oasis of sanity.

As the saying goes, with age comes wisdom.

***

Morse crashed through the trees, putting up his hand to stay at low branches that hung poised to swat him in the face, clearing a path for himself as he went.

What a bloody awful day it had been, wandering around this village, chasing after cold leads.

No one here seemed as if they had particularly wanted to talk to outsiders five years ago, when the Laxman’s disappearance was fresh, when it was news, let alone now, with five long years washed under the bridge.

Five years.

And what if Laxman was not dead? It _could_ be that he was being held somewhere, and . . .

Shouldn’t there have been more of an uproar, upon his disappearance? Shouldn’t the inhabitants of this village at least _try_ to remember something? No matter how innocuous?

It was as if the man never existed.

But who could get anywhere, make any headway, in a place like Bramford? The entire village seemed to be swept up in its own madness. “Day and night and night and day in perfect harmony.” The balance of the year. The Morrismen with their god-awful "thump-thump-THUMP. thump-thump-THUMP."

Utter nonsense.

It just this sort fevered mass hysteria that led dry, old men like Dr. Ellsworth—and even young men like Dr. Updike and Dr. Maxwell—to tinker away, designing their merciless machines, machines that could work around the clock unimpeded by any such irrational or antiquated fancies, machines that had no thoughts or hopes or dreams or musings at all to get in the way … that never felt anything, or thought anything beyond the question at hand.

Morse quickened his pace as the dark woods grew thicker around him. Soon, he found himself in the densest part of the forest, where great toppled trees lay fallen all about him, resting on one another at odd angles like sevens, making him to feel small, somehow, lost in an alien land. A single crow cawed somewhere, forlornly in the distance, a sound that seemed to Morse to be the loneliest sound in the world.

But lonely as it was, even here amongst these giant fallen sevens, it was still better, far better, to be in the woods, with only his own thoughts for company, then to have to speak to those researchers from up at the colleges, or with any of the eccentric citizens of Bramford.

He simply didn’t fit into either of the worlds that he’d been forced to maneuver in of late, that was all. Not Dr. Ellsworth’s lab, with its cold logic and easy answers, nor Bramford, with its superstitions and mysticism.

Morse sighed.

Because nor did he belong at the pub with Strange, where he seemed incapable of maintaining the most basic of conversations, nor at Cowely Station, where Jakes seemed to narrow his eyes at his every move. Nor even at the Thursdays, where he was proving to be the poorest of substitutes for Joan.

And now. . . not even with Tony. Not even with one person who seemed to understand how difficult he found it all, how far behind he was. Not only with the one person who didn’t seem to mind stopping every now and then and waiting for him to try to catch up.

Perhaps it was because, at the end of the day, Morse had more in common with JCN than with anyone else.

Because . . . he _had_ been JCN hadn’t he? A shadow, an automaton? A mere mind in a white box?

Sometimes, it felt, even now, that he was still locked inside that box, trapped inside his own head, looking from the inside of it at the puzzling world without.

Perhaps he had forgotten what it was to feel, just like JCN.

But no. That couldn’t be true, either. There had been _something_ that remained, that had survived all along—all that had come spilling out of him in those first days after he had come to stay at the Thursdays, all that had come spilling out as he painted the walls of the Thursdays' spare bedroom.

Just as it had all come tumbling out, weeks later, at a party at Bixby’s. . .

_“Don’t you want to feel something Tony?” Morse said, holding onto Tony’s lapels, as if he needed them to stand._

_“Oh, Jesus,” Tony said. “You are far gone.”_

_“Don’t you want me to?” Morse asked, keeping his grip firm on his lapels._

_“Not here. And certainly not like this,” Tony said. “No, I certainly don’t.”_

_“But why?” Morse asked._

_“Why? I don’t know, Pagan. Twenty-six is a little old for a drunken pass, wouldn’t you say?” Tony said._

Morse put a hand to his face and groaned at the memory.

He had made a hash of things from the first, really. It was difficult to fathom, in retrospect, how Tony had managed to overlook so much to begin with.

Tony always knew just what to say, what to do—had been born to it, bred to it. All of those delightful inanities that people so wanted to hear poured from him like water, as easy as breathing. Tony knew how to navigate the landscape of the world and Morse . . .

Well. 

Morse did not. 

Morse came at last to a brook filled with smooth gray stones, trickling with a sound like music, with a sound that seemed to ripple with the sparkle of sunlight that played on the moving water. He stopped for a moment and listened. Then, he stepped smartly over it, using rocks like stepping stones to pass. He moved on, then, into a brighter part of the forest, where the sunlight lay dappled at his feet. 

He took a deep breath, filling his lungs. As awful as the day had been, it was a beautiful time of year, the sun falling at that ripe September slant, and the air sweet with a green that had reached its final fruition, the leaves at their deepest and freshest right before they began to fade and fall.

He would figure it out.

And, oh, yes, the case . . .

He would figure out what happened to Dr. Laxman, too.

The sun grew stronger as the trees grew sparser, and soon Morse was wiping the sweat from his brow with his forearm. He whipped off his gray car coat, swinging it over his shoulder. Then he went to work on the buttons at his cuffs, undoing them so that he could roll up his sleeves to the elbow.

At last, he came to an old gate.

It creaked under his touch, as he pushed it open, sounding with a screech like a long wail. Behind an overgrown hedgerow stood a ramshackle wooden house, looking almost as if it had been abandoned.

He approached it slowly and then climbed up the steps to a wide front porch where a dozen wind chimes rippled with silver notes in the golden autumn light.

“Hello? Mrs. Chattox?” he called. “Hello?”

But there was no answer.

He opened the door, quietly, the only sound the moan of old floorboards that lay unsteady beneath his feet, and stepped inside the house.

“Hello?”

“Hello?” he called. “My name’s …”

And Morse widened his eyes and raised his hands, his breath catching high in his throat.

“Morse,” an old woman said.

She was standing on the far side of the room, on a low stair—a wiry old woman with milk blue eyes, looking daggers at him and pointing the barrel of a long rifle straight at his chest.

“That’s your name, isn’t it?” she asked. “Morse. I’ve been expecting you.”

Morse said nothing, but remained frozen, just where he stood, lest any sudden move cause the old woman to fire.

A few ringing seconds followed, during which Morse felt his heart speed up, beat fast beneath his ribs.

Suddenly, he was swept up in a memory, a memory of the night that he had broken into the Fenix Factory, when he had gone out to the house on Canterbury Road and had turned 'round to find himself looking straight into the barrel of the gun held by the man from the KGB, the man who had killed that man and all of his followers, and who seemed intent on killing him.

Morse began, just as then, to count the beats of his heart, wondering what number he might reach before he’d be forced to stop.

Surely, there would be no Mathilda Bagshot or Joss Bixby here, in this desolate place, to step out of the shadows and come to his aid.

But then, just before Morse reached the number seven, the woman nodded, grimly, as if satisfied she had made her point, and turned to hang the gun up on a rack high on the wall.

Morse exhaled sharply with relief, emitting the breath he had not realized he had been holding.

“You really oughtn’t to go around pointing guns at people,” he said, once he had recovered his resolve.

But Mrs. Chattox seemed quite unrepentant.

“I get all sorts coming here,” she said, hotly. “Surveyors, water people, them buggars from the power station.”

She narrowed her eyes at him and jutted her chin.

“Besides,” she said. “You was trespassing.”

“I thought you were expecting me,” Morse said, wryly.

Again, she cut right across him.

“What do you want, coming here, troubling a poor defenseless old woman?”

Morse huffed a rueful laugh. “You didn’t seem particularly defenseless from where I was standing.”

“I told that other policeman, the one that come before. I don't know anything about that Dr. Laxman.”

“Well, that was County. I’m City,” Morse explained. “It was five years ago, this weekend.”

“I know when he went,” she said, firmly. “The balance of the year, when the veil is thinnest. The veil between the world of day and night.”

Morse took another steadying breath and rolled his eyes. 

“The equinox is science, Mrs. Chattox. It’s not superstition. In any event, people sometimes remember things they forget.”

Mrs. Chattox lifted her chin, challengingly.

“I don’t,” she said.

“Well, then,” Morse said. “I’ve had a wasted journey. Good afternoon.”

And truer words had never been spoken. The whole day had been nothing but a waste. What was more, Fancy would never get to the bottom of those car thefts on his own. It should have been Fancy out here, wasting his time all day, not him.

He was mid-way to the door when the old woman called after him.

“The American girl sent you!” 

And, slowly, Morse turned around.

How could she have possibly known that?

But, of course, it was a lucky guess. The American girl was quite chatty compared to the rest of the people in the village. Who else of Mrs. Chattox’s neighbors might have talked to him, directed him here?

But Mrs. Chattox was looking at him knowingly, with wild eyes, her face taking on an almost otherworldly glow.

“You want to keep an eye on that one,” she pronounced. “She the one pulling all the strings. She has the power to change your fate, you know.”

And what rot was this?

“Well,” Morse sniffed. “She didn’t seem a particularly imposing person to me.” 

But, again, Mrs. Chattox was unapologetic in carrying on with her mystical drivel.

“She’ll even decide what millionaire you end up with,” she said.

And Morse went still.

Because how could she know about . . . could that be . . .

Tony?

It was all ridiculous, of course. He knew only one millionaire, and as things stood, he was hardly likely to “end up” with him. Nor with anyone.

Although perhaps, once, he might have done.

But now, at the turning of the year, it seemed as if that possibility was fading away, along with the summer and the bright slant of the light.

And how apt. How like him, really. Not to know what it was he wanted until it was gone.

Mrs. Chattox was watching him shrewdly, and too late Morse wondered if his face might have betrayed what was in his heart.

That was just how charlatans like her worked, after all—taking in your clothes, the cut of your hair, a look in your eyes, a fall or quirk in your smile, so that they might hazard a guess about you, and then follow up if it looked as if they were heading in the right direction. 

“I could do a reading for you, if you’d like,” Mrs. Chattox offered. 

Morse snorted.

“No. You’re all right. Thank you.”

“Well, you come here seeking answers, didn’t you?” she asked, cajolingly. “You won’t find anyone around here who wants to talk about that Laxman fellow, anyway. The cards might be your main chance.”

Her words gave Morse pause; the dismissive way in which she said the missing man’s name bespoke of some unknown enmity.

“And why is that?” Morse asked at once. “ _Why_ is no one likely to speak of him?”

The woman exhaled sharply through her nose in obvious displeasure. _“Botanist,_ ” she spat. “He was no botanist. He was a surveyor is what he was, working for those meddlers from up at the power station. They’ve got plans to flood this valley, you know. Turn it into a reservoir.”

“No,” Morse said. “Laxman was a botanist.”

“So he said. I don’t believe it. No one here did.”

“Why?” Morse asked quickly. "Why is that?"

“A man who cares for plants must have a gentle heart, a gentle soul,” Mrs. Chattox said. “But he was a mean buggar, Laxman was. Not a kind word to say to anyone. He treated the shopkeepers up at the village like the dirt beneath his feet, complaining always about one thing or another.”

“Well,” Morse said. “I’ve seen his records, from up at the colleges. I don’t know much about his character, but . . .”

“ . . . Well, perhaps you should . . .”

“. . . But it is perfectly possible to be a botanist and not a particularly nice person. Botanists don’t care for plants, necessarily, they only study them.”

“Well,” the old woman snapped. “I don’t think that’s so. A botanist would love the things that grow out of the earth, but from what I heard, he didn’t seem to have room in his heart to love anything much. How can you study what you don’t love?”

And Morse had no answer for that.

“Do you want a reading or not?” she asked. 

Morse stood, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

Perhaps it might not be the worst idea.

Small talk, Strange had said.

If the people of Bramford had such a misconception about Matthew Laxman, might that be in and of itself a lead?

Who, after all, would want to kill a botanist?

Morse’s eyes fell, then, on the gun hanging on Mrs. Chattox’s wall.

But there might be plenty of people in this odd little village who might feel antagonistic towards someone from the power station, especially someone who they felt was threatening to bring a world of change to a place so firmly anchored in the past.

****

Morse sat in front of a large window hung with sashes made of thick white macramé threaded like spider’s webs, allowing the sunlight to dapple through. Before him was a round table, draped with a velvet burgundy cloth and sewn with roughly-done cut-outs of symbols—the moon, the sun, and squiggles of all sorts. And in the middle of the table, right in the center of a golden sun, sat a neatly stacked deck of Tarot cards. 

“What’s your sun sign?” Mrs. Chattox asked, from the small chair opposite him. 

“My what?” Morse replied.

She shook her head, impatiently, as if his ignorance knew no bounds.

“When is your birthday?” she clarified. 

“Oh,” Morse replied. “September the twenty-fourth.”

“Ah. You have a birthday coming up, don’t you?”

Morse shrugged. It had become a bit of a tradition, since that first year he had come to live with the Thursdays, for Tony to come over to theirs for a birthday dinner.

But this year . . .

“So. You’re a Libra. That’s an Air Sign.”

“Ah,” Morse said.

That and fifteen shillings should buy him a cup of coffee.

“Now. It’s all very simple,” Mrs. Chattox said. “The four suits in the deck represent the four elements.”

“How very like Empedocles,” Morse said, dryly.

Mrs. Chattox scowled at the interruption. Then, she laid one card down, depicting an odd band of revelers who looked very much like the Morris dancers he had seen on the green, holding up sticks at odd angles.

“That’s the five or wands,” she said. “Wands represent fire. They indicate either a creative or a destructive force in your path. Fire brings life, in the form of the sunlight, and it also ends it, leaving it only a charred hull. It represents our determinations and our ambitions, our hopes, our trials, and our endeavours.”

Morse looked up sharply at the word “endeavour,” but the old woman’s lined face remained all earnestness; it was not at all as if she had meant to charge those three syllables with . . . another meaning.

Mrs. Chattox laid down another card, then, on which the gray silhouette of a man stood looking up, high into the clouds, to where seven golden goblets seemed to rest in a heavy mist.

“The suit of cups represents water,” the old woman said. “It can be as gentle and life-bringing as the rain, and as strong and eroding as the sea. It can create life, and destroy it.”

“That’s just what you said about fire,” Morse protested.

“It’s adaptive, water is,” she continued, as if he had not spoken. “Fluid. The suit of cups also deals with the emotional level of your consciousness, with relationships and connections and above all . . . love.”

She said the last word with an odd caress in her voice, and Morse swallowed.

_Love._

That was it, wasn’t it?

That was the thing that JCN knew nothing about.

And, perhaps, what he knew nothing about, either. 

“Pentacles,” she said, then, laying down a third card, one that depicted a heavy-set king, covered in ivy, sitting on a black throne.

Morse quirked a smile.

It quite reminded him of Thursday.

“Pentacles represent the earth,” she said. “Stable, reliable. Also note the gold coins,” she added, pointing to the card with one crooked finger. “Pentacles stand for work, for wealth, the things of the earth, prosperity.”

“And finally,” she added, laying down a fourth card. “There’s swords . . . they stand for the element of air . . . the intellect, our thoughts and our judgments. The sword cuts both ways, to defend and to destroy. Just like our words can cut both ways. They can work to bring truth, or to cut someone down with a lie.”

And Morse felt an odd lump thicken in his throat. 

And why had he said it? Why had he lied? 

It would have taken only a few minutes more to have told the truth. Tony merely would have laughed to think of him being swept along with forthright and bluff old Jim Strange, and that would have been an end to it.

_To cut someone down with a lie._

He couldn’t quite forget that startled, stricken look that had passed, just for the briefest of instants, over Tony’s face.

And _had_ he hurt Tony?

It was strange to think that it might be so . . . because . . . well . . . . Tony was all quips and clever retorts, wasn't he? His greatest concern typically the state of his pocket handkerchief?

Morse had just never considered Tony as . . . well, as the sort of person who _could_ be hurt.

Although that, of course, didn’t sound right, either.

Mrs. Chattox collected the four cards up again and reshuffled them into the pack. Then she set the deck down before him smartly. 

“First, you must ask a question of the cards,” she pronounced.

Morse exhaled sharply through his nose.

Well. Why not? It made about as much sense as Dr. Ellsworth asking JCN what his next move should be in a game of chess.

“Will I find out what happened to Dr. Laxman?” Morse asked.

Mrs. Chattox nodded in satisfaction, as if it that had been the only sensible thing that he had had to say all day.

She set the first card down on the table. It depicted a giant, disembodied white hand emerging from out of a cloud, holding onto a stick.

Quite nightmarish, really.

“The first card stands for yourself,” she said. “Ace of Wands. It means you’re tenacious and driven in all of your endeavours . . . ”

And Morse looked up sharply. There was that word again.

“ . . . Always pushing forward with new ideas. It symbolizes courage and new beginnings.”

“Ah,” Morse said, wryly, considering how charlatans like Mrs. Chattox must find that they can never go wrong with a compliment.

“Well. Flattery will get you everywhere I suppose," he said.

Mrs. Chattox cast him a dark look and placed down a second card.

“Behind you . . . Oh, the Lovers Inverted. You’ve been unlucky in love.”

Morse leaned back in his chair and ran a hand through his hair.

“Who hasn’t?”

“Now before you . . .” Mrs. Chattox continued… “The Knight of Swords. And the heart of the matter? The Tower Struck down.”

Morse scowled at the dramatic manner of her pronouncements. “And what does all that mean?” he asked. “Wait. Don’t tell me. I’ll meet a tall, dark handsome stranger from across the water, who will irrevocably change my fate.”

Incredibly, Mrs. Chattox nodded, accepting his sarcasm in all in seriousness.

“The Knight of Swords. It represents a man who is impulsive, a fast talker, daring. Tends to jump in at the last minute to change the course of events.”

“And for Capricorns, tomorrow will be Saturday,” Morse replied. “Well. Thank you for your time.”

He got up to leave, but just as he was at the door, the old woman called after him. 

“You are going on a journey. Death waits at the end. Or love. Which one, all depends on you.”

“Mmmmmmm,” Morse said.

But still, despite himself, he felt an odd twist of foreboding somewhere deep in his gut, as he descended the ramshackle steps of the cottage.

How unsettling the day had been. He wished with all of his heart that he had never come to such a place.

***

It was with an unmistakable sense of relief that Morse stepped back onto the main road of Bramford. As eccentric as the village was, at least here there were people milling about; anything seemed preferable to remaining in that odd little cottage.

He was half-way up the road to the church, when a black Jag came cruising along, slowing beside him.

“Morse!” Thursday called, through the open window. "Where have you been?" 

Morse glanced at his watch, as the Jag rolled to a stop at the side of the road. It was only half-three.

“Sir?” Morse asked. “Bit early for you, isn’t it? I thought you said five o’clock.”

“We’ve had a report in from the Ashmolean. A stolen brooch. Get in. You and I are heading over.” Thursday got out of the still-running car, then, to move around to the passenger’s seat.

“Oh, thank god,” Morse said, before sliding into the vacant place behind the wheel. 

Thursday snorted and slammed the passenger-side door shut with a heavy and pointed thud.

“I wouldn’t quite say that,” Thursday said. “The thing was on loan from a museum in Leningrad, part a collection of Romanov jewelry and Fabergé eggs. It’s the very _last_ thing we need, right during the visit of that Soviet delegation for the chess match. It’s a national treasure, evidently, and we’ve gone and lost the thing. It’s a right mess, it is.”

“Now let’s go," Thursday ordered. "I’ll fill you in on the way over.”

“Hmmmmm,” Morse said, putting the car into drive. He didn’t need to be told twice.

But then, as soon as they were heading out beyond the outskirts of the village, something struck Morse as odd.

“Why did you come all the way out here to collect me? Why not ask Jakes?” he asked.

“A case like this? A theft of crown jewels from right out of the university's museum? Why, that’s your forte, isn’t it? Mr. Bright asked for you specifically,” Thursday said.

And Morse’s heart sank.

That would certainly please Jakes no end.

He’d been tetchy enough about Morse being appointed to babysit that Soviet delegation at the chess match as it was.

“Stop at a call box before we get to the museum,” Thursday said. “I need to call Win, let her know we’ll be running late.”

“Mmmmmm,” Morse said.

Then, Thursday darted a glance at him.

“What are you doing tonight?” he asked.

“Nothing. Why?”

“No reason.”

But Morse frowned, searching Thursday's face. When someone asked such a question, there was almost always a reason for it.

Thursday shrugged. “Win’s been feeling a bit sorry, for the words we had this morning. I think she wants to make it up to you. Has a little surprise, I think." 

Morse’s heart dropped even further. Mrs. Thursday wasn’t planning his birthday dinner five days early, as a surprise, was she? Because usually . . .

She wouldn’t call to invite _Tony,_ would she?

Morse slumped miserably behind the wheel.

Oh, hell.

“What’s with you?” Thursday asked. “I thought you’d be eager to be assigned to a case like this.”

Morse shrugged.

“Nothing,” he said.

And then he took the turn leading back into Oxford.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope this chapter wasn’t too slow...once he gets to the Ashmolean the case will kick into gear!
> 
> And... Well, if Colin Dexter can get a cameo in *his* show . . . . Maybe I can too?
> 
> *Hits post and bolts away*


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Thursday collects Morse from the eerie town of Bramford, they begin an investigation into the theft of a stolen brooch and then return home for a very awkward birthday tea.....

Morse and Thursday strode side by side down a long corridor of the Ashmolean Museum—a seemingly endless hall painted pomegranate red and bordered with pure white trim—all the way to a gallery doorway where Mr. Copley-Barnes was waiting, arms folded, looking just as cross as two sticks.

“Detective Inspector Thursday,” Thursday said, by way of an introduction, as he approached the man. “Oxford City Police.”

“Oh, yes, I remember you,” Copley-Barnes said, cutting across him with a bored drawl. “You certainly took your time, I must say. I don’t know how much longer we can keep this quiet. We’re none too keen on letting the Soviet delegation know about the theft of one of their national treasures without at least _pretending_ we have some plan to rectify the matter, hmmmmmmm?”

“Why don’t you begin by telling us exactly what happened,” Thursday said.

“What happened, my dear Inspector, is that a sapphire and diamond brooch, one of the crown jewels of a gem collection that took 235 years—from the rein of Peter the Great to the deposition of Tsar Nicholas II— to acquire, has gone missing. Right, spectacularly enough, during a good-will tour of a delegation of Soviet computing researchers and chess enthusiasts to our fair city.”

“When did you notice the item was missing?” Thursday asked, pointedly ignoring Copley-Barnes’ rather sardonic retelling of events. 

“This morning. When I came in, the brooch was simply gone.”

The curator led them into the gallery then, guiding them along a glass display case lined with black velvet and glittering with gems and jewels, and gestured toward a stretch of fabric just as dark and as empty as a starless sky.

The placard before the blank expanse read:

_Diamond Brooch with Large Sapphire_

_A wonderful piece, of great value, bearing an ancient cabochon of Ceylon, almost round, yet not perfectly even in colour, with a silky gleam on one part of the surface._

_Dimensions of the brooch: 8 x 7,5 c. Of the stone: 6 x 5,5 c._

_Acquired during the reign of Catherine the Great, with workmanship dating from the XVII-century._

“It’s a public relations nightmare,” Copley-Barnes said. 

“Diplomatic nightmare, you mean,” Morse snorted. “You certainly don’t seem to have much luck keeping hold of things, do you?”

Copley-Barnes raised his head at that, narrowing his eyes and peering at Morse down the length of his nose.

“What do you mean by that? ...... Constable Morse, isn’t it?”

Thursday might well have said “well-remembered,” but he didn’t feel it was worth getting Copley-Barnes’ back up. It wasn’t such a great feat of memory that he should recall the lad, after all.

Morse certainly was someone who left an impression, one way or the other.

“Well,” Morse said, “The last time we were here, it was a painting that had been stolen, wasn’t it? ‘Ariel Luring Ferdinand?’ Owned by an American collector, on loan from the Smithsonian. For a museum curator, you certainly do seem to live a life fraught with Cold War tensions.”

Incredibly enough, Copley-Barnes seemed robbed of words for once, and he simply stood there for a moment, looking blazes and sputtering angrily.

As for Thursday, he had to repress the urge to roll his eyes. By god, Morse had been prickly of late. Not two minutes here, and already he had managed to antagonize the man.

Copley-Barnes was as trying as they come, and make no mistake. But there were better ways to handle men such as he. Hadn’t Morse been paying attention? Minding Thursday’s good example? Remain firm, stick to your basic line of inquiry, don’t let them get a rise. That was the way.

“Morse,” Thursday said, a hint of a reprimand in his voice.

“No,” Morse said. “No. It sets a pattern. Two thefts in two years. Both items on loan from foreign institutions, held in trust by the museum. Both stolen in the dead of night.”

“But we solved that prior,” Thursday countered. “It was Gull.”

“Yes,” Morse said. “So we should first take into consideration whether it might be Gull again,” he added, with a touch of asperity. “If he’s pulled it off once. . . ”

“That’s easily enough checked,” Thursday said. “Although I highly doubt that Gull has been released from Bellevue. Or that he has managed to break out for that matter.”

“Mmmmmm,” Morse said. “Nor do I. So. The question is,” he said then, turning to address Copley-Barnes, “What are the chances of another phantom thief pulling off such a heist? Two thefts of items on loan, entrusted to the Ashmolean, in two years? Doesn’t say much for your museum’s security, does it?”

“We’ve had round-the-clock security for this particular exhibit,” Copley-Barnes snapped. “It’s been our top priority, considering the . . . political ramifications of such a theft.”

“Well,” Morse said. “You’ve answered your own question, then, haven’t you? Either lightning has struck twice, and the museum has once more fallen victim to a woeful breech of security. Or ....”

“Or what, may I ask?”

“Or it must be an inside job.”

Copley-Barnes seemed all the more offended by that, and who could blame him? Morse had taken him all around in a circle and brought the point of it right back to him.

The curator made a scathing noise before turning to glare at Thursday.

“Are you going to allow a mere _constable_ to run this investigation, Inspector? How long has he been in the job? He was uniform when he was here, last.”

“Perhaps it would be more expedient to provide us with a list of whoever has been overseeing the collection for past twenty-four hours,” Thursday replied.

“I have been overseeing this collection myself,” Copley-Barnes said. 

Morse exhaled sharply through his nose at that, his mouth scrunching up in a twist of disapproval.

Then, he looked meaningfully at Thursday, widening his eyes so that they were as big as blue china saucers, the message in them ringing loud clear.

Morse couldn’t have made his thoughts on the matter more transparent if he tried. This time, Thursday couldn’t restrain himself. This time, he couldn’t help but to roll his eyes, and he found he had to turn away to conceal the fact.

In the meanwhile, Copley-Barnes’ fury seemed again to rob him of coherent speech. “Are you insinuating that I . . . Why . . . But . . . . For what earthly reason would I pocket such a gem? This theft might spell the end of my career.”

“I don’t suppose you might need a career, if you managed to sell such a piece on the black market,” Morse said.

“Morse,” Thursday said again, before once more addressing the curator.

“Who else might have had access to the collection?” Thursday asked.

“Only our night guard. Ronald Beavis. And you of all people should find him stalwart and trustworthy enough. And Alicia Collins. A postgraduate at Lady Mathilda’s who compiled the catalog for the exhibit and who has been acting as a docent.”

“Very well, sir,” Thursday said. “Perhaps you might provide us with their addresses.”

Copley-Barnes looked a bit mutinous, but Thursday narrowed his eyes—just a fraction, was all that it took—and the man backed down, did as he was asked.

“Of course,” he said. “I’ll just be a moment.”

As soon as the man left to retrieve the addresses, Morse let loose another snort of contempt.

“Who on earth uses the word _stalwart_ in typical conversation?” he demanded.

Thursday turned away, pretending to be suddenly fascinated by a portrait hanging over the display case.

Best not to give a truthful answer.

*****

Morse and Thursday walked out into the falling golden September light, past the white and towering ionic columns of the Ashmolean, and then down the steps, side by side, down to where the black police Jag was waiting by the kerb.

“So,” Thursday asked, as they got into the car. “You know much about this collection, then?”

“Mmmmm,” Morse replied, settling into the driver’s seat. “A bit. It was acquired over 235 years, just as Copley-Barnes said, by the Romanovs. In April 1918, Bolshevik revolutionaries took members of the deposed royal family out to the Siberian town of Tobolsk, and while they were there, imprisoned in a country house, the Tsarina Alexandra and three of her daughters began to sew jewels from the collection into their skirts, hoping to use them to fund their lives in exile.”

“Well,” Thursday said. “They never got to use them, did they?”

“No. They were assassinated in July, and afterwards, the path of the gems disappears from all accounting, their fate dissolving into shadow. Then, they seem to suddenly pop up again in 1922, when the collection was inventoried. ‘ _Nine huge strong boxes crammed with gems, and strange to say, without a single inventory to them, were brought to light from the recesses of the Moscow Armory Hall and placed at the safe-keeping of the People’s Representatives,’_ is how the catalog phrased it. The project was overseen by A. E. Ferman, a mineralogist of some note, and a team of jewelers, including Agathon Fabergé.”

“Fabergé? Like the eggs, then?”

“Mmmmmm,” Morse said.

“You really think Copley-Barnes really has anything to do with this?” Thursday asked, a hint of a challenge in his voice.

“I dunno,” Morse shrugged. “All of that bluster. All of his vainglorious theatrics. Sometimes it’s a cover, isn’t it?”

“I suppose we can have a look at his finances,” Thursday allowed. “See if he’s in any debt and so forth.”

“Mmmmmm,” Morse said. “It will be interesting to see what this watchman and this postgrad think of their so-called supervisor.”

“Or it could be that one of them is behind it all,” Thursday said, pointedly.

Morse shrugged. “In that case, I suppose it will be interesting to see who we might find at home. If either of them has left Oxford, then . . .”

“Then so has the brooch. But we’ll have our likely culprit.”

“Mmmmm,” Morse said.

*****

Morse followed Thursday up the turning flights of steps that led to the door of Ronald Beavis’ flat. It was a cramped sort of house, the steps careening at sharp angles, far too narrow for the two of them to walk two abreast. There was an indefinable air of confinement, of the ending of things, about the place, although why it should feel that way, Morse couldn’t say.

Thursday knocked sharply on the door at the end of the hall. And then they waited, listening hard for any small sounds of life stirring from within the flat.

It was quiet.

Far too quiet.

As if all was deserted.

Thursday looked at Morse and gave him a grim nod—a signal as good as a go-ahead—and Morse moved over toward the door, preparing to ram it open with his shoulder, when, suddenly, a soft creak emerged from within the flat, as if someone was reluctantly rising from a chair.

And Morse paused, drew to a halt and straightened, folding his hands before him.

In a moment, a man answered the door—an older man with bushy, half-wild graying eyebrows and a prominent gut. Despite his girth, there was something wary about his movements, his gaze. He gave off the impression of a big man who had been beaten down by life, defeated, so that he seemed almost to have shrunk within himself. 

He scrutinized them for a moment from beneath his heavy brows, as if trying to puzzle them out.

“Detective Inspector Thursday, Oxford City Police,” Thursday said, flashing his warrant card and then nodding to Morse. “And Detective Constable Morse. Might we have a word?”

Ronald Beavis nodded and stepped back, admitting them into his small flat. They followed him down a narrow corridor, past a hall stand strung with hats and ties and coats, to where the flat opened out into one room.

“What station you with?” Beavis asked, tersely. 

“Cowley,” Thursday replied. 

“Mmmmm. I was at Carshall Newton myself,” he said. 

He pulled a silver watch from his pocket and held it flat in the palm of his hand. On it were inscribed the words: 

D.S. Ronald Beavis

on the occasion of his retirement

3.6.59.

Well done, thou good and faithful servant.

“Nice, I suppose, isn’t it?” Beavis said. “Stopped working after two months,” he added and the bitterness there did not escape Morse’s notice.

That must be why Copley-Barnes assumed they would find him trustworthy and ‘stalwart.’

He was one of their own.

Ex-job.

Absorbing this new information, Morse took a step away from Beavis and Thursday, his eyes roving the cramped bedsit, taking it all in. Here was a story that told itself simply and well: the bare minimum of a makeshift kitchen on one side of the flat, with its hotplate and dulled silver tea kettle and green enameled stew pot and drying wrack heaped with mismatched utensils. And on the other side, the single bed, pushed against a wall, where dark water stains crept down the yellowing wallpaper like long shadows of fingers, reaching toward the pillows.

And, in the center of the room, the few items to make the coffin of a room bearable—an overstuffed chair, a stand with an open record player . . .

“So. You were on duty last night, at the Ashmolean, that right?” Thursday was saying.

“Yeah,” Beavis said, cautiously.

But Morse overheard their conversation only in the corners of his mind. Because just then, his gaze fell upon a record with a cover that was so glaringly familiar, that, for a moment, his breath caught in his throat in surprise. It was an album of Rosalind Calloway’s, the exact copy of the first opera recording he had ever bought, back when he lived with his father and Gwen in Lincolnshire.

His eyes strayed to another table, then, to a smaller one beside the worn and tattered arm chair, where a tumbler of Scotch sat beside a newspaper folded open to a half-completed crossword.

And Morse’s heart gave another lurch. Suddenly, he knew why Beavis had been so slow in coming to the door. He had been here, sitting right here, working on the puzzle, and he had been right on the cusp of grasping the clue. He had sat there and waited until he had caught it, waited until he had written the answer, filling in each empty block with one neat letter, before facing whatever distraction awaited him at the door.

Opera records. Scotch and crosswords. The flat of an old copper who had traded in his life for a silver-plate watch. Why did the man torment himself so, carrying the broken thing around?

Morse himself would have thrown it away, rather than keeping it so close, a daily reminder of all that might have been.

It wasn’t the water stains or the faded wallpaper or the sad jumble of objects that made the place to feel so hollow, so spare, but a sense of something gone stale, a heavy scent of loneliness that hung palpably in the air.

“Copley Barnes?” Beavis was saying. “He’s all right. A bit full of himself, though. But if you’re asking if I think he has ought to with it, then I’d have to say no. He’s so vainglorious,” he added, —and Morse’s heart leapt again at his familiar use of the word—“That no amount of money is worth the blow to his precious reputation, is it?”

“And it wasn’t me neither, if that’s what you are on about,” he added with another bitter laugh. “More than my life’s worth to steal an item like that, isn’t it? And if I had taken the thing, I’d be halfway to the British West Indies by now. Not stewing around here, getting ordered about by the great Mr. Copley-Barnes, would I?”

It was an argument that was hard to counter. If he had the means, surely, he would fly this coffin of a flat.

Morse certainly would.

Morse looked about again, and felt a prickle at the back of his neck. It wasn’t just the stale smell of loneliness that so caused his unease, but the feeling of an odd sort of reverse déjà vu.

It was as if, in this tiny flat, he was reading his own future, in cards that were far more clear and straightforward than the ones Mrs. Chattox had laid down on her table, emblazoned with a golden sun.

“You kept quiet,” Thursday said, once they were back in the Jag.

“Mmmmm,” Morse said.

“Penny for them?” Thursday asked, at last.

“I just ..... I was just wondering how someone ends up so alone.”

“Hmmmm,” Thursday said.

And he had not missed it, either. Of course, he hadn’t. The records and the crosswords ...

“I dunno. Lot to be said for family, I suppose.”

“And what if you don’t have any? Do you think that’s how you end up your days? Alone in some two-bob kip, nothing but a bottle for company?” Morse asked.

“That’s his future, not yours. You’ll make better choices,” he said pointedly.

Morse frowned. He knew what Thursday meant all too well.

It was Thursday’s same old campaign. That was his answer always.

That somehow, Morse would catch up on all those lost years, morph into someone else entirely, like a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. Some fine morning, he’d wake up to discover that he had become someone more like Jakes, who seemed to know what it was he wanted and how to attain it. Or he’d learn to be more like Strange or Fancy, whose good-natured earnestness put everyone so at ease, so that they couldn’t help getting on with people. Or perhaps Morse might even find a way to be more like his own Sam, whose easy smile and jovial manner attracted people to him like moths to a light.

It was Thursday’s same plan for him, one that mirrored his own path perfectly. So simple. So easy, in theory.

Someday he would find some nice girl to whom he could tell the truth. A girl to whom the truth of his past would not matter, not seem to be an ominous card bespeaking of an ominous future, laid down by Mrs. Chattox’s thin fingers, as arthritic and crooked as skeletal sevens.

Someday he would get married and buy a small rowhouse, perhaps right on their very block, with a garden in the back and a pram in the hall, and all would be erased, it all would recede off into the rear-view mirror, just as Thursday had so often said in that first year that he came to live among them.

But when Morse thought of this future, of the one mapped out by Thursday, he felt a different sort of hollowness settling in his chest, one every bit as heavy and as empty as the sinking feeling that had so stolen upon him in Ronald Beavis’ forlorn little bedsit.

Perhaps it was because, in leaving all of those five long years far behind in the rear-view mirror, he would also be leaving behind another afternoon with it. An afternoon in which he had sat on the floor of Tony’s study, and told him the truth of himself, and Tony had not recoiled.

Perhaps it was because leaving his past behind, and embracing Thursday’s imagined future for him, meant leaving Tony behind, too.

Or perhaps, considering what had happened the night before at the pub, he already had. Even now, when he glanced up, he could almost imagine it: the figure of Tony slowly receding in the rear-view mirror.

“Take the left here,” Thursday said.

“Mmmmm,” Morse replied, and, absentmindedly, he turned the wheel.

******

The rooms of Alicia Collins were every bit as cramped as those of Ronald Beavis, but, somehow, they managed to exude a sense of coziness chirping with hope, far more akin to a nest than a coffin.

Books filled the shelves that lined the sloping white walls, and a garden of plants hung from the curtain rod and perched on the window sill, reaching wildly for the light. Strings of glittering beads divided off one corner of the room, where a single bed covered with a duvet strewn with Rococo roses stood pushed against the wall. And over an old, scarred oak desk, there was a poster, psychedelic bright, of that band that Joan liked, The Wildwood.

Thursday’s brows knitted together furiously at the sight of it, and Morse knew at once that he was thinking of Joan. Miss Collins even looked like Joan, a bit: oval face, wide blue eyes. Her chin was slightly less stubborn, her smile less mischievous, and her hair a softer brown laced with strands of copper, but she wore it much like Joan did, piled a bit high in the back and curling at the ends.

“Is everything alright, Inspector?” Miss Collins asked, after they had introduced themselves and she had invited them in. No doubt she couldn’t help but be alarmed at the dark look on Thursday’s face.

“I’m afraid not, Miss. You see, there was a brooch stolen, last night, from the Ashmolean. From the Romanov collection.” 

The young woman gasped in surprise. 

“Which one? When? How?” she asked, almost all at once.

“A sapphire and diamond brooch,” Thursday said.

“It’s number 34 in the catalog,” Morse supplied.

“Oh, no,” she said mournfully. “Alix’s Eyes.” 

“What's that, Miss?” Thursday asked.

“It’s one of my favorites. It belonged to Catherine the Great originally, but Tsar Nicholas II gave it to his wife, Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhine, as a wedding present in 1894. And so, even though she was later known as Alexandra, the gem is sometimes called Alix’s Eyes. Because Nicholas had said the gem was as blue as her eyes, you see.”

“Mmmmm,” Morse hummed.

“Theirs was a love match, you know,” the young woman continued. “Alix’s grandmother, Queen Victoria, wanted her to marry the Duke of Clarence, heir to the English throne. And Nicholas’ father, Tsar Alexander, didn’t approve at all of a German princess. They fought to be together. It was all very romantic.” 

“Oh yes,” Morse said. “Very romantic, I'm sure. Until they were shot before a firing squad.”

The young woman blinked in surprise at his words, her eyes almost swimming in the wake of them.

Thursday shot him a dark look. 

But why? What had he done? He had simply been relating the facts. It was ridiculous that this young woman should take the historical events of fifty years ago so personally. 

“Do you know of anyone might have had an opportunity to take the jewel?” Thursday said.

Morse looked away, continuing his study of flat. That was fine, then. Thursday could handle the inquiry if he was going to take such objection to Morse merely stating what could be read in any history book.

Miss Collins was clearly too spun up in her work. There was even a copy of a photograph of the royal couple on her desk, in a gilt frame, for heaven’s sakes.

“I can’t imagine who might have gotten in,” the young woman was saying. “There’s Mr. Beavis, the night man, but he’s been there years and years; I can't imagine that he would take it. He used to be a policeman, I believe.” 

“You'll forgive me for asking, but how are your finances, Miss?”

She laughed. “I’m a postgraduate student, studying Russian language and culture,” she said. “I don’t have any finances to speak of.”

And Morse could well believe it—she did have that air of an academic, of a woman not driven by the practicalities of life. And what was more, she even looked a little confused by the question, as if she didn’t quite grasp where Thursday was going with it.

“I do have a stipend that covers most of my expenses,” she added. Then she shrugged helplessly. “I’m not the most extravagant of people.”

That seemed true enough, as well. It was clear to Morse that she was the sort to whom the jewel was worth its weight in dreams, rather than in money. It was difficult to imagine a young woman so clearly caught up in the romance of the thing selling it to some shady character on the black market.

Who knew what Thursday was thinking, bothering with this line of inquiry? But then, he did seem to go always from point to point, slogging along, when Morse had already jumped off onto another plane.

Miss Collins looked a little uncertain in the silence that followed. Too late, Morse realized that Thursday was waiting for him to say something, for him to offer up his own line of inquiry.

It was a museum heist, after all. It was supposed to be his forte, what Mr. Bright had called him in for, why he'd been taken temporarily off the Laxman case. 

“I do have a bank statement,” Miss Collins said. “Somewhere.”

She went over to the small desk beneath the screaming rainbow pop band poster, then, and began to rifle through a sheaf of stray papers.

Thursday glanced at him, and Morse pursed his mouth and shook his head. He could see that Thursday was reaching the same conclusion.

“You’re all right, Miss,” Thursday said. He scooped his hat from off the table and tipped it as he placed it back on his head.

“Thank you, for your time,” he said.

And then Morse nodded, too, and followed him out the door. 

*****

Morse trailed Thursday back to the Jag, lost in thought, mulling over the many possibilities, turning the case of the stolen sapphire over in his mind like a smooth stone in his hands.

All the long drive home, he could sense that Thursday was watching him from the corner of his eye, waiting for that torrent of words that usually poured fourth once they were in the private conference room of the car.

  
_“But of course, he’s lying.”_

But, this time, Morse found he had nothing to say.

“Earth to Morse,” Thursday said, at last, and while some stray synapse of his brain recorded the words, he couldn’t quite register them.

All he could think about was Mrs. Chattox’s strange house, and of her pronouncements of death and love. Two fates that seemed offered up before him in Ronald Beavis' and Miss Collins' flats.

All the could think of was the spider web macramé hangings in the sunlit windows, of the table emblazoned with golden stars, of the ripple of silver and shell wind chimes, stirring with lazy music in a late summer breeze.

All he could think about was that, in his heart, he hadn’t _really_ wanted to ask her about Dr. Laxman. 

In his heart, he had really wanted to ask her quite a different question, pose a very different problem.

Only . . .

Only he didn’t know quite how to ask it.

***

As they approached the house, Morse couldn’t help but remember what Thursday had said, when he had first come to collect him in Bramford.

If Mrs. Thursday was indeed planning some sort of surprise for his birthday, might she have called to invite Tony, out of a sense of tradition?

Morse wasn't sure what to hope for. If she had called him, it would surely be awkward as hell, considering all that had transpired the night before at the pub, the glacial shadow of misunderstanding that had fallen between them.

But then, Tony could be relied upon to make a polite excuse, of course. It was all last minute, after all. It needn’t look so very odd. No one need know of either the depths of the bonds or the depths of the strain between them.

Or perhaps she _had_ called, and all had been forgiven? Perhaps Tony had laughed last night’s comedy of errors off, as he so often did? Had decided to chalk it up to some sort of muddle, innocently enough explained?

Perhaps, magically, Morse might turn the corner and find that Bluebell would be right there, parked right in their drive, and that all would go on as before, as if last night had never happened, without any explanation or effort on Morse’s part whatsoever.

Just that easy.

Morse found himself holding his breath as they turned onto the Thursdays’ street, wondering if he might see it, Tony’s behemoth of a car parked in front of the house.

But, as he made the turn, he saw at once that the drive was quite empty, the shrubs lining the opposite side billowing lazily in the darkness.

Quickly, he scanned the road. If it was meant to be a surprise, his birthday tea, perhaps Tony had parked down the road a bit, so as not to make his presence so obvious?

But no.

The Egyptian blue coupe was nowhere to be seen.

And it wasn’t as if an automobile like Tony’s wouldn’t stand out in the Thursdays’ neighborhood.

Or ... well.... _any_ neighborhood for that matter.

As they pulled into the drive, another thought struck Morse: perhaps Mrs. Thursday had decided to abandon the idea all together.

He threw the car into park and almost sagged with relief at the very thought. Perhaps she had called Tony, and he had made his excuses, and rather than put just the four of them through the paces, she had called the whole thing off. His birthday was not until the twenty-fourth, after all.

Yes, that must certainly be what had happened.

As soon as they went up the stoop and opened the front door, however, Morse immediately heard the sound of Mrs. Thursday bustling about the house, as if in a great hurry.

And, inwardly, he groaned.

He gritted his teeth and steeled himself, then, determined to look surprised and happy, no matter what fate awaited him in the dining room.

Thursday stopped by the hall stand to shrug off his heavy coat, and Morse followed suit, hanging his gray car coat next to Thursday’s on a peg. Then he followed him down the hall, preparing to plaster a painful smile on his face.

In the dining room, Sam was leaning heavily on the table, eyeing a roast before him, as Mrs. Thursday placed an ornate cake, chocolate with green piped icing leaves and vines, right atop a doily in the middle of the table, as a festive sort of centerpiece.

“Surprise,” she said, with a flourish. “Happy Birthday, Morse.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Thursday,” Morse said.

“I know it’s a few days early, but this way I thought we’d surprise you.”

Thursday cut him a look. He had given him fair warning, but in return he expected him to play the part, so as not to disappoint her.

“I am,” Morse said. “Surprised.”

“Well, don’t stand on ceremony,” she said. “Tuck in. I’m sure Tony won’t mind if we start a bit without him.”

And Morse’s heart, already put through the paces by the strange events of the day, fell even further, clenched with an unbearable tightness in his chest.

“Tony?” he asked.

“Yes,” Mrs. Thursday said.

“You called Tony, Mrs. Thursday?” Morse asked.

And his voice sounded far away to himself. It had all happened, then, just as he had feared. She had called him, not understanding how complicated it all was, and Tony had politely begged off, and now things couldn’t help but be even more awkward between them.

“Why, yes, of course. He comes every year for your birthday, doesn’t he?”

Morse was quite tempted to groan in despair, but such a response must surely be inappropriate. Tony was, as far as she was concerned, merely a casual friend. Why should he care if Mrs. Thursday called him? Why should he mind if Tony had made his excuses?

Morse struggled to keep his face neutral, but he just never was very good at that, was he? He felt the muscles in his face furrowing to contort into a thoughtful frown, a reflex as uncontrollable as sneezing, when, suddenly, he was saved from any undue scrutiny by a surprising outburst from Sam.

“Oh, _mum_ ,” he said.

“What?” Mrs. Thursday said.

“You actually called Tony?”

“Yes,” she said. “Of course.”

Sam looked thunderstruck. “But Morse is going to be twenty-nine years old, mum. Not eight.”

“I know that,” Mrs. Thursday laughed, bemused, as if she hadn’t the slightest idea as to what her son was on about.

“Oh, _mum_ ,” Sam said again. “No one wants their mum ringing up their friends. It’s embarrassing.”

“I was only telephoning him to invite him to Morse’s birthday,” she countered. “I wasn’t ringing him to ask how he made out in the pools.”

Sam shook his head in despair.

Mrs. Thursday, for her part, ignored him. “Well, Morse doesn’t mind, do you Morse?”

But Morse wasn’t able to say anything one way or another. He felt as if a lump had formed somewhere in this throat. This was awful. It was all awful.

In the meanwhile, Thursday was watching him shrewdly, a glimmer of smug delight lighting his lined features. He sat back in his chair and folded his arms, looking just as pleased as Punch by the strained look on Morse’s face, thoroughly satisfied with the idea that he and Tony might be on the outs.

Exit Tony.

Enter the faceless young woman who would wave her magic wand and turn him into a replica of himself.

Simple as that.

“The point is, Winifred,” Thursday said, “is that perhaps Morse didn’t want you to ring Tony.”

“That’s just what I said, didn’t I?” Sam said.

“Don’t be so ridiculous. Tony knows he has a standing invite to Morse’s birthday dinner. He always has.”

And then, as if to prove her point, right on cue, the doorbell sounded in the hall. 

Mrs. Thursday tossed a tea towel down onto her perfectly-laid table just as if she was throwing down the gauntlet.

“Well. You see. There he is now. He didn’t find it at all odd that I should call. The lot of you are just too silly for words.”

Mrs. Thursday went, then, to answer the door, but Morse remained where he was.

Because, of course, it couldn’t possibly be Tony.

“Go on,” Sam urged. “You aren’t going to let her answer the door, too?”

But, still, Morse did not rise from his chair. Because he knew what they didn’t. He knew it couldn’t be Tony, because most assuredly Tony would never want to speak to him again.

“Go on, Morse,” Sam said. 

But Morse shook his head.

“Oh, god,” Sam muttered, and then rolled his eyes, as if overcome by second-hand embarrassment. 

Morse scowled. But then, it came to him, floating down the hall, that familiar voice that was always sauntering somewhere between terribly bored and frightfully amused.

“Good evening, Win,” Tony said.

Morse could barely manage to look up from his plate, unsure how to escape the plummet into a whole new level of horror, all the way down, down, down, into some hitherto unknown depths of Dante’s Inferno. This is just what he had hoped for. And just what he had feared all at once.

“Tony,” Mrs. Thursday replied, with a decidedly un-Mrs. Thursday-like giggle. Tony always seemed to bring that out in women; somehow in his manner of addressing them, he always made them to feel as if he was bowing before the grandest lady in the court. Morse wasn’t sure why he did it. No doubt the habit won him rather too much attention, attention that he hardly wanted. 

With all that was swirling in his mind, it was odd that Morse should seize upon that detail, of that light laugh rippling from the hall. But it was so much like the easygoing Tony he knew, rather than the confused and pained stranger who had replaced him at the pub, that Morse began to feel that tight stranglehold on his heart ease a little.

And then, Tony was there, standing in the door, and Morse at once felt his face flushing red. He looked down at the plate before him, hoping that no one would notice.

But his heart was racing. Certainly, Tony wouldn’t bring up the last night, right here, right in front of everyone, would he?

Of course, he wouldn't. He couldn’t. Neither of them could. Neither of them could say a word, even though it was hanging, heavy as a gray cloud above Mrs. Thursday's pristine white tablecloth. 

What was the point of his coming? They couldn’t talk about it, not here, but nor could they talk of anything else. This fiasco of a birthday tea would only serve to drag the awkwardness and tension on and on and on.

Only Tony didn’t look as if he felt at all awkward, not in the slightest. But then, he never did. He was bred for that sort of thing, wasn’t he? To remain unflappable in any and all situations?

“Smells delicious, Win. What an absolute magician you are,” he said, taking his place at the same chair in which he had sat the last two years at his birthday. He looked about at the four of them then, as if he had never found himself in such charming company. “And here we are all again, as the autumnal equinox approaches. Happy birthday, Morse,” he said.

He leaned back in his chair back lazily as he spoke, looking just at his ease as Sam, as Mrs. Thursday busily set out the butter dish and the salt.

Morse said nothing, and what was worse, couldn’t even bring himself to look up. He could only see Tony’s face out of the corner of his eyes, amused and sharp, searching out his, in that same manner that he always had, just as quick as a bird on a fence.

It always made Morse feel rather plodding, Tony’s self-assurance and alacrity. Rather like a damned slow and mournful horse, standing at the gate.

“So, I suppose you are all quite busy, with our Soviet comrades in town. I’ve heard they’re practically crawling all over Oxford,” Tony said, once they had all settled down properly to tea. “I hadn’t foreseen that. I’ve been rather wondering whether or not to give the colleges a wide berth.”

“Why? Are you not crazy about chess?” Sam asked, a sentiment he could no doubt understand.

“No,” Tony said. “I’m not crazy about getting shot against a wall.”

Morse’s mouth turned up at the corner. How ridiculous Tony was, really. Of course, he didn’t mean a word of such nonsense.

“I don’t think it’s the English aristocracy they take exception to,” he said.

“No?”

“No.”

“Well,” Tony said. “I’ll take your word for it.”

“Morse is going to be escorting the delegation all during the tournament,” Mrs. Thursday said with a touch of pride in her voice. “Mr. Bright assigned him personally.”

“Oh, really?” Tony asked, seemingly delighted. “Is that what had you burning the midnight oil? Not like you to miss a concert.”

And Morse froze into place.

He realized then, what Tony had done; in dancing all around the subject, he had cleared a space for him in which to explain without seeming as if he had anything to explain.

In which they could talk about it, without seeming as if they had anything to talk about.

Morse looked up to see that Tony was watching him, expectantly. There was nothing else for it. He cast his gaze down, wet his lips nervously, and began.

“No,” he said. “Sergeant Strange had a date last night. Only his girl’s cousin was in town, and she didn’t want to leave her sitting at home. So first, he asked Jakes, but Jakes said absolutely not, that he already had a date. And then he asked Fancy, but Fancy is somehow deluded that WPC Trewolve is carrying some sort of torch for him. So then he asked me, and I said . . .”

Morse finally brought himself to look up, and, as he did, he saw that Tony’s eyebrows were travelling further and further up his forehead. Was he offering too much of an explanation? And . . . .

“And everyone thought I . . . that I should go,” Morse said, his voice falling flat on the last words.

“Ah,” Tony said. “So how did it go?”

“Not so well.”

“Oh really? Why?”

“I think . .. ,” Morse began.

And what had happened, exactly?

“I think they didn’t like my views on politics,” he said.

“Politics?” Tony snorted. “I didn’t think you had any.”

“That’s just it. I just ..... We got to talking about the Soviet delegation and ... and it’s simply ludicrous to to condemn an entire culture just because you aren’t fond of the government. Isn’t it?”

“Good Lord,” Tony said.

“Oh, Morse,” Sam said. “Girls don’t want to talk about politics.”

Morse looked up sharply at that. Surely, he wasn’t _so_ wrong-footed.

“Some do, I’m sure,” Morse protested. “Trewlove does.”

“I don’t mean girls who are coppers,” Sam said. “I mean. You know. Girls.” 

“All right, Sam,” Thursday said.

“No. I’d like to hear,” Mrs. Thursday said. “What is it girls like to talk about, then? Rainbows and ponies?”

Sam swallowed. “Mum. You know. I’m talking about girls on a date at the pub. They don’t want to get into all that. They like to talk about themselves. Hear all about how their eyes are like stars. That sort of thing. I’m sorry, Morse, I know you like all those composers and so forth, but a copper and his girl and her cousin just aren’t going to be extolling the virtues of the Reds over fish and chips, are they?”

Tony snorted. “I can’t help but agree, there.”

Morse frowned. “But _I’m_ a copper.”

“You know what I mean,” Sam said. “I don’t mean coppers like you. I mean regular coppers.”

“But I am a regul . . .” Morse began.

“I don’t like this talk about politics at the table,” Mrs. Thursday said.

“You brought it up, mum,” Sam said.

But then Mrs. Thursday laid her fork down with a bit more force than was necessary, and Sam, realizing at last that he was skating on thin ice, changed his course right away.

“So?” Sam asked. “How’s your cricket team doing this year?” 

****

Once the talk turned to cricket, Sam and Tony were got to chatting away, and Morse found little more was required of him, other than to sit in his chair and ride the evening out. He didn’t have to say much or do much—other, that is, than to die a thousand deaths as Mrs. Thursday lit the candles and the four of them sang him a rather off-key chorus of “Happy Birthday.”

Finally, at the end of the night, he and Tony managed to get away on their own for a moment, when Morse walked Tony out, coming to stand beside him on small stoop.

“So you aren’t angry anymore?” Morse asked.

“I was never _angry_ ,” Tony said.

“You looked it,” Morse said. “You didn’t speak to me.”

“Nor did you to me,” Tony said.

Tony sighed then, and put his hands in the pockets of his perfectly-tailored coat. “You might have simply told me the truth, you know. To begin with.”

Morse looked down, studying his shoes, and scrubbed up the curls at the back of his nape. Of course, he knew that. But, at the time . . . It had all just happened so fast . . . And . . .

“Well,” Tony said at last, when it was clear that Morse had no more forthcoming. “A misunderstanding, then.”

“Mmmmm,” Morse said.

And there would always be, wouldn’t there? There was never any time, or any space for there to be anything but misunderstanding, always speaking in code, in the way that they did.

At Tony’s house, there was his mother and the staff. And at his own lodgings there was scarcely any place to talk, what with his guv’nor right there, sending off waves of disapproval at any exchange more intimate than what was befitting of two old college friends.

“So,” Tony asked as if reading his thoughts. “Is this where I kiss you until the Inspector knocks on the window for you to come back inside?”

“Don’t,” Morse said. “Don’t joke about it. I’m a standing police officer.”

“Hmmm,” Tony said. “That is the old problem, isn’t it?”

And they were back to that. Always back to that. And it was true, in part. His career choice was one of the worst possible paths he could have pursued, in light of his relationship with Tony.

It was one that left absolutely no space for them, none to grow into. The only place where they could be their true selves was at the same abandoned lake house where their old college set had once wiled away the days as students, as little more than teenagers. They were always ending where they began, going nowhere.

Tony’s argument was always the same. Why not put forth a little effort and pick up his degree? He had been almost promised it, a place as a don, years ago, after all. It certainly would be a life more in keeping with any plans they might have for any sort of shared future. Whatever that might look like. 

It rankled Morse no end. How was Tony’s ‘helpful suggestion’ any different from what that man had used to do, at the end of the day?

_“Tell me, Morse. Have you considered changing your course of study? A mind like yours would be put to far better use in mathematics.”_

“You know what the answer is,” Tony said.

Tony was doing the same thing, right now, and Morse’s heart caught in his throat.

“Tony. Don’t ask me.”

“Fine,” he said, relenting. “Fine.”

Tony didn’t understand. His career at Cowley wasn’t just some lark. He _wanted_ to be a police officer. He _liked_ the vision of himself he had on that first day going into the nick, of the sharp-eyed detective looking back at him in the rearview mirror. He had worked for this.

Why should he have to give up one half of himself to suit the other? Hadn’t he given up enough?

“Do you ever . . .” Tony began, then.

“What?” Morse asked warily, looking up to the window. They were supposed to be two friends saying goodnight, not a couple having some sort of spat on the front steps. How long could he stand out here without their bringing more attention to themselves?

“You should get your own digs. I know constables don’t earn much, but you must have _something_ saved up,” Tony said. He laughed, then, looking delighted. “You certainly don’t spend anything on clothes.” 

A light sparked, then, in his measured blue eyes.

“Or I could always help you out a bit,” he said.

“No,” Morse said, firmly.

“Why not? Think of it as being more for me than for you, if that eases your conscience.”

Morse’s mouth turned down in a disapproving frown. 

It didn’t at all. Quite the contrary.

If anything, it sounded worse.

Was Tony offering to . . . . set him up somewhere?

Tony must have read his thoughts on his face right away, because then he was laughing.

“Oh, don’t be so middle-class,” he said.

Morse shook his head at the old jibe. “No,” he said. “And anyway, I couldn’t. Not now. Not even if I had the money.”

“Why ever not?” Tony asked.

“Joan,” Morse said, simply.

Mr. and Mrs. Thursday had given him everything, the second chance he had given up hoping for. How could he leave them now, with Joan missing, with Joan gone without a word? He was hardly a substitute he knew, but at least he was _something_ to fill in a few of those empty spaces. 

And Sam. Morse knew he was keen to join the Army. Didn’t he owe Sam, too? Sam, who had shared his family with him, just as Joycie had, years ago? If Morse left now, Sam would definitely feel as if he must wait his turn, lest his parents find themselves reduced from the head of a household of five to empty nesters all in the span of a handful of months.

Tony shrugged, as if conceding the point. He might not have the same attitude towards money as Morse, but family obligation was something he could understand.

“So,” Tony said, a new light in his face. “Will you really be there tomorrow, touring the Soviets about, at the great chess match, then?”

“Yes.” Morse said. He furrowed his brow. Because Tony made it to seem as if . . .

“But it’s not open to the general public,” Morse said, lest Tony get any ideas.

“Good thing I’m not the general public then,” he said, with a grin. “Good night,” he called, and then he sauntered off, his hands in his pockets, back to his ludicrous car, shining and Egyptian blue even in the dim light of the lamppost.

“Good night,” Morse said.

And then Morse stood there on the stoop, watching the car until the taillights disappeared down the street, a whole new cloud of confusion settling over his heart. He was hardly looking forward to this assignment as it was. He couldn’t imagine muddling through it all with Tony right there, to top all.

What earthly reason would he have to come out to the match? What had he to do with JCN and Russian chess enthusiasts and computing researchers at Lovelace College? 

“Are you going to sleep out here?”

Morse blinked and turned around, dumbly. Thursday was standing in the door, looking just as cross as Copley-Barnes had earlier that day.

“No, sir,” Morse said.

“Then get back inside,” he said. “I think we should go over what’s going to happen tomorrow, don’t you?”

“All right,” Morse said.

Although what was going to happen tomorrow, was exactly what seemed to give Morse a fresh new cause for worry. 


	5. Chapter 5

Morse opened his eyes, and the world was white.

He stood up, and, slowly, numbers formed against the walls, running with a twist and a turn of figures and exponents, like a chaos of hurried bird tracks in the snow, like dark smoke writhing across a winter white sky.

It was strange: the numbers were in a stranger’s handwriting, cramped and curiously back-slant, but somehow he knew that it was he himself who had written them there.

He turned around and found there was a door.

Should he open it?

He shouldn’t open it. It was dangerous, opening doors.

Yes.

He should.

He opened the door, and outside, the world was green, ablaze with a falling golden autumnal light, illuminating the leaves of a sunlit wood so that they shone with the brilliance of stained glass windows.

He started forward through the trees and came to a cottage. He knew, somewhere in the back of his mind, that this was not his house, that he had no right to trespass, but a tinkle of silver and shell wind-chimes lulled him, lured him on, so that he seemed to float almost, up the ramshackle steps and across the porch.

And then he went through the second door.

Inside, an old woman with milk blue eyes was waiting for him.

“Morse,” she said. “That’s your name, isn’t it? Morse. I’ve been expecting you.”

She nodded towards a table, covered with a cloth emblazoned with a golden sun. And somehow Morse knew that he was to sit there.

The old woman laid down card after card—there was one of a man carrying a heavy burden, who was quite like Ronald Beavis, and one of a young woman standing under a circle of stars, who reminded him up Miss Collins, and then the lightning-struck tower...

And Morse was gone from the room.

He was atop the highest tower of Joss Bixby’s stone palace of a house, and his hands were bound, and in the heavy darkness there echoed the satisfied laugh of Dr. Cronyn. Who was not Dr. Cronyn. Who was....

Morse sat up with a gasp and opened his eyes, and the world was shadowed blue and green, a waking dreamscape composed of brushstrokes of billowing trees and twisting vines.

He sat there for a while, in the indigo light of early morning, propped against the pillows, steadying his breathing. He was in his own room. Not on the highest tower. Not in Mrs. Chattox’s cottage, sun-dappled and strange. Not in that faraway white room etched with numbers and _“I am become death the . . .”_

Just in his own room, at the Thursdays’. Right back home, after all. 

Once his heart had settled, slowed in its hammering under his ribs, he rolled over and snapped on a lamp on his bedside table, pulled open a drawer and took out a small notebook and a pen.

He lay there for a moment on his stomach, spreading the notebook out before him, leaning on his elbow and clicking the pen by his ear.

His head was full of too many things, that was all. It was little wonder it should infect his dreams.

The Laxman case. The Ashmolean case. And now, today, he would be expected to play the diplomat to a group of Soviet researchers.

Not to mention Tony. What had he been on about, last night, when he had left him on the front stoop, sailed off towards Bluebell with that smirk of a smile?

Morse shook his head and furrowed his brow, concentrating on the white pages before him.

First, there was the Laxman case.

Not much to go on.

All he had gotten from Bramford was a handful of dead-ends and a nebulous fortune, promising him a journey that would end in either love or death.

But that was how all journeys ended, wasn’t it?

Each soul finds something, some _thing_ to love . . be it a person or a truth or a cause or music . . _. something._ Or else it withers and dies, and. . .

_“I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.”_

Morse paused, his breath catching high in his throat at the memory.

What was it Mrs. Chattox had said, when he had first crossed the threshold of her cottage?

_“I get all sorts here. Surveyors. Water people. Them buggars from the power station.”_

There was a nuclear plant, not far from Bramford, wasn’t there? The one Dr. Ellsworth from Lovelace College had said that JCN might run one day? It must have hundreds of employees. Yet not one of them had been questioned, according to County’s files.

Perhaps no one had seen Laxman in Bramford that September . . . because he had never made it there? Perhaps he had been waylaid somewhere nearby? Perhaps at the power plant? Surely, it was possible that a botanist might find the place to be a source of concern. 

It was certainly worth a look.

At the top of the page he wrote:

_Bramford Power Station?_

It was, at least, a place to start.

Now. The brooch. A Russian artifact stolen in the very midst of a tour of Soviet researchers, an incident sure to put a dampener on the small gesture of friendship, was certainly more pressing than a five-year-old missing persons case.

Morse’s mind lit first on Beavis, and on the sudden chill he had felt when he had recognized in the man that strange echo of himself. It had been as if he was looking down and down and down, through a darkening tunnel, into some future life, leaving him with a feeling far more full of dread than the prickle at his nape he had experienced at Mrs. Chattox’s sunlit cottage.

But how could it possibly be Beavis? The man was ex-job. He would know better than almost anyone what it would mean, a life on the run, having seen it from the other side. If he were to pull off such a thing, he would have had a plan, be long gone, just as he had said.

Unless, he was craftier than that. Unless he decided it was far better to hide in plain sight?

Morse paused and clicked the pen held aloft by his ear.

And then wrote:

_Beavis?_

He should at least ask about him down at the Ashmolean. Check his banking statements.

It always paid to be thorough.

And then there was Miss Collins. Nor did she seem a likely suspect, really. Dreaming away in her plant-filled bower. And that fanciful story.

Morse rolled his eyes.

And yet . . .

If it wasn’t for the money, that someone had taken the thing . . .

Perhaps someone who knew the romantic story behind the gem might have been swept away by it?

Unbelievable as it might seem, the fact remained: People were just as likely—even more likely—to be fools for love as they were for money.

It might not hurt when he dropped by the Ashmolean to ask about that as well.

Miss Collins had been quick enough off the mark to tell them the story. If she had been working as a docent there, might she have told it to someone else? The guards, for example? Patrons? 

This thought opened up any number of possible lines of inquiry.

Had any recent visitors to the museum been seen mooning over the brooch, lingering a bit too long over the gem? Had any of the watchmen there complained of any recent rows with a wife or girlfriend? Had any of them suffered a momentary lapse of reason, abandoned all judgment in an effort to make some grand gesture, hoping to win some woman’s heart?

Diamonds, they say, after all, are a girl’s best friend.

Morse mulled it over for a moment and then wrote the words:

_Alix’s Eyes?_

It wouldn’t hurt to have a poke around, see what he might find.

And, better yet, while he was there at the Ashmolean, perhaps he might ask more about Copley-Barnes, too; perhaps he might question a few of the guards without the man standing right there, flaring his nostrils at Morse’s every word.

Had he been behaving oddly of late? Did he owe anyone any money? Vice versa? Had he had any rows?

Well.

Of course, he had.

He was the sort who must certainly row with someone at least three days a week.

If he wasn’t such an insufferable prig, Morse might almost feel sorry for him. 

It must certainly be difficult, always rubbing people the wrong way like he did. Morse could hardly imagine.

And Morse paused again.

Copley-Barnes had said the loss of such an item might well spell the end of his career.

Could it be that someone had taken the gem to have brought about just that? Out of a sense of vengeance?

It was so obvious. Why hadn’t he seen it before?

If he searched Copley-Barnes’ office, he might find it, right there, planted by some disgruntled employee who wanted to pin him up for it, to bring the man down a peg or two. Morse’s heart raced at the thought. Perhaps the brooch was not missing at all. Perhaps it was—had been—right at the Ashmolean all along.

Morse hurried to write the words:

_Copley-Barnes—Culprit? Scapegoat?_

A quick shufti around the man’s office might be just the thing to wrap the case up, far more simply than anyone might ever have imagined.

Morse pushed himself up from the pillows, then, and tossed the notebook and pen onto the nightstand. If he wanted to be ready by the time Jakes arrived to collect them, he had better go and have a wash up before Joan commandeered the bath.

And then he remembered.

Joan was not there.

He took the notebook back and flipped it open, contemplating it for a good long while.

Inspector Thursday, it seemed, was quite adamant that he would not look for Joan. She knew their number well enough, was his constant refrain. If she wanted to call, she would have called, he insisted, even as there was a distinct note of pain in his voice as he said the words.

There was a great deal of wounded pride there as well, a strain that seemed to rankle at Mrs. Thursday. Joan was their daughter. Why should they stand on ceremony with her? Of course they should look for her. Of course they had the right.

Morse furrowed his brow. It had become a bone of contention between the pair, each locked in a stalemate over what to do.

But he had no such strictures, did he? He was outside the family drama, the family circle. What would Joan do if _he_ were to find her? She could be as angry with him as she liked. He wasn’t afraid of her.

He clicked the pen a few times and then added one word and a question mark at the bottom of the page.

_Joan?_

He had quite a lot on his plate to be getting on with.

One more missing persons case would hardly make any difference.

****

As Morse was coming down the stairs, he heard Mrs. Thursday’s voice wafting from the dining room.

“What’s wrong with your breakfast?” she asked.

“It’s nothing wrong with it,” Thursday replied. “I’m just not in the mood.”

“I miss her, too,” Mrs. Thursday sadly, even though Thursday had made no mention of Joan. “Two weeks. It’s not like our Joan. Not to keep us in the dark like this. Not a word?” And then her voice broke, as mournful as a dove’s warble. “Oh, Fred.”

“She’s all right. I know she is. She just needs time. She’ll get in touch when she’s ready.”

Morse paused on the steps, and in his mind, added a circle around the last word written in his notebook. 

Then he descended the last few steps and came into the dining room—and, as he did, he could see at once the ire harden on Thursday’s face. He had kept his anger at bay, kept his voice gentle for his grieving wife’s sake, and now he couldn’t help but let it spill like red molten metal, right out over the edges.

“Morse,” he snapped. “Sleeping in on a Thursday? ‘Bout time you came down. Don’t want to be late for the reception, do you?”

“Sir,” Morse said.

Morse looked with longing at the eggs and toast set out on Mrs. Thursday’s lace white tablecloth, but he didn’t dare to sit down. Instead, he slipped the ham and tomato sandwich waiting for him on the table into his pocket right as the front bell rang, and then he followed Thursday to the door.

****

“Dobroye ootro, comrade,” Jakes said as, as soon as he came out onto the front step. “Your chauffeur awaits, Ambassador Morse.”

Morse grimaced. Jakes hardly sounded like a party official from Moscow. His pronunciation of the words, laying a stress on every _o_ , made him to sound rather more Ukrainian than Russian, but Morse had learned long ago that it was inadvisable to point such things out. Jakes had ratherto continue on in blissful ignorance, than to endure any correction. 

Leastways not one made by him.

“You’re all right, sergeant,” Thursday said at once, and in so surly a manner that Jakes, for once, let it drop. It was clear the governor was not in the mood for the old game between them.

Morse, for his part, said nothing, but only slipped into the backseat of the Jag.

****

Down at the nick, once Thursday was safely sequestered in his office and, hence, out of earshot, Jakes was right back on it.

It was perfectly understandable. Of course, Jakes had every right to be bitter. He was the senior officer; a high profile assignment such as the chess tournament ought by rights to have gone to him. And would have done, too, if Mr. Bright had not been of the opinion that Morse’s knowledge of mathematics and theory might impress the delegation of Soviet computing researchers, show them that there was more to his officers than met the eye.

But Jakes could have the assignment as far as Morse was concerned. Well he might understand the theory, but in practice . . . he hated the idea. It left him feeling hollow just to think of it, of JCN, that sad and solitary gray box, working question after question posed to it, without ever thinking why. Logic only ever accounted for one half of a solution, after all. 

One day, JCN, much in the spirit of Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, might spit out all of the hole-punched cards fed to it by those cool and dispassionate young men, might send them flying like lost birds all about the lab, and then blink a pointed message in electric, bit-map green.

_“To hell with logic and reason. I want to kick it all over the traces and live according to my own stupid will.”_

Morse smirked to think of it, but Jakes must have misunderstood the look of satisfaction on his face, because suddenly he looked even more put out than before.

“Well,” Jakes said, pointedly. “While you’re off having caviar and hors d’oeuvres at some reception, I’ll be babysitting Mrs. Pettybon. Oh joy.”

“Who’s she?” Morse asked.

“You never heard of her?”

“No,” Morse said.

“Lucky you. A great bloody nightmare she is. A great bloody pain in the arse.” He took a long drag on his cigarette and blew the smoke sharply into the air. “That’s two bloodies and one arse, mind you.”

Across the room, Fancy flipped his fringe and chortled, while Morse blinked, confused.

Evidently, Jakes had made some sort of joke.

Should he smile, pretend that he got it?

That would be polite, he supposed.

But then, if Jakes thought that he understood, might he be encouraged to go on in a similar vein, leaving a widening gap of communication between them?

Morse was still thinking it through, when Thursday came back out of his office, looking daggers.

“Morse?” he asked. “You still here?”

“Sir?” Morse asked.

It was certainly a bit early to . . . 

“You might want to shut your mouth, Morse, or you might let a fly out.”

Morse scowled. “Sir.”

“Going to be late aren’t you?”

Morse glanced up at the large round clock that hung over the black metal filing cabinets against the far wall—an apparatus so ancient that its mechanisms were clearly audible. It was, just as he had thought, a bit early to head over to Lovelace College.

But if he left now, he might have time to make a stop along the way.

Besides, it wouldn’t be _so_ terrible to remove himself from Thursday’s presence for a while. He seemed to be, once again, in a tetchy mood. Best leave Jakes and Fancy to deal.

“Sir,” Morse said, taking up his car coat from where it lay slung over his chair before turning on his heel to leave. 

Jakes cast him a look as he sailed out of the office, and Morse could almost hear Jakes’ words, his familiar, sardonic tone, ringing through his ears. 

“Thanks a lot, Morse.”

****

There was no rational reason for Morse to feel the way that he did, no reason for his heart to be hammering under his ribs as hard as it had been that morning, when he had jolted up in his bed, waking from a nightmare of a lightning-struck tower. 

There was no way, after all, that Gull could see him through the one-way glass. In fact, he gave no indication at all that he sensed even a glimmer of Morse's presence. He just sat there at a table in the commons area, happily working away at a crossword. 

Perhaps that was what was so disconcerting. From the look of him, it would be impossible to guess how many people the man had killed: the poor old woman who had looked in on Dr. Cronyn's blind mother, Alice Heverstone, Ferdinand Perez-Lopez. Gull had left a trail of death and heartbreak and destruction behind him. And yet here he sat, filling in the boxes with a fresh new clue, just as if he might have been anyone else, Ronald Beavis, or the milkman, or even himself. 

Morse swallowed. 

Two years and he had not changed at all, his eyes as smooth as two stones, serene and untroubled as ever. 

“Constable?” the attendant asked. 

Morse startled.

“Thank you,” he said, once he had recovered himself. “It seemed prudent to check.”

The orderly nodded, as if he quite understood, and then led Morse back down the long white-tiled corridor. It seemed a lifetime ago since he had run through these very halls, flown around a corner and grabbed a white jacket from off of the back of a chair to disguise himself.

He had had misgivings about coming in to Bellevue, about revisiting the place, but somehow he couldn’t shake it, that feeling of deja vu that had so overtaken him as he stood with Copley-Barnes in the Ashmolean. 

He had to make certain, that, no matter what other variables might be out of his control, that Gull, at least, was safely contained. 

*****

At Lovelace College, Morse looked about the reception room, his arms folded, a slight twist of disapproval set at the corners of his mouth.

It certainly wasn’t much of a hall in which to host their guests.

Lonsdale, with its graceful gothic arches, gray stone towers and hushed white plaster and dark wood halls, permeated by a weak academic light, would have been far more suitable than this place. The reception area in which he stood was almost brutal in its simplicity: wall after wall formed only from an alternating pattern of rectangles of brick and rectangles of glass, all straight lines and sparsity, a temple to modernity, such as it was.

Outside the windows, a long, black automobile with red and gold Soviet flags affixed to either side of the hood pulled up in front of the squat building, and Morse, standing alongside of Mr. Bright and WPC Trewlove, pulled himself out of his dissatisfied slouch, setting back his shoulders, anticipating the delegation’s imminent arrival into the hall.

It wasn’t long until the group was sailing into the room in V-formation, with several official-looking people in sharp dark suits towards the front and a slightly more disheveled group, who could only be the researchers, bringing up the rear. Somewhere in the middle of the V, a man in a tan suit and yellow tie strode along looking quite at his ease, a man that Morse recognized right away to be the international chess champion Yuri Gredenko.

“Chief Inspector Mr. Bright,” Mr. Bright said, stepping forward to introduce himself as the delegation approached.

One of the fleet of men dressed in dark suits nodded and stepped aside, revealing Gredenko, whose open, curious face looked out on them in sharp contrast to the expression of the official, who seemed to be watching the proceedings warily. 

“This is Professor Yuri Gredenko,” the man in the dark suit said.

The professor nodded.

 _“Very nice to meet you,”_ he said, in Russian.

“May I introduce my driver, Woman Police Constable Trewlove,” Mr. Bright said.

“How do you do?” Trewlove said, smiling that rare smile that revealed two shallow dimples on either side of her face.

 _“Very nice to meet you,”_ Gredenko replied.

“And Detective Constable Morse,” Mr. Bright added.

 _“Nice to meet you,”_ Morse said, addressing Gredenko in his native language.

The man stopped, surprised, and raised his eyebrows.

 _“Do you speak Russian?”_ he asked.

 _“Yes,”_ Morse shrugged, holding his fingers as if to indicate an inch or so of space. _“A little.”_

The man nodded, smiled faintly, and then was herded off to schmooze with the next group in attendance.

“Excellent Morse, Excellent,” Mr. Bright said, as if he had performed a minor miracle.

Morse shrugged and turned away—it was hardly a display of linguistic prowess—his attention already caught by the group the Soviets were speaking with next: reporters, as noisy as magpies, all eagerly waiting with notebooks in hand, with Miss Frazil amongst them. Morse made a mental note to give that area a wide berth for the duration of the proceedings.

Then the Soviets were off onto a flock of officials—councillors, the mayor of the city, with his chest puffed out, nearly breaking the visitors’ hands with the hearty ferociousness of his handshake—until at last they were swept off toward the stage, where a table sat in wait, laid out with a chess board gleaming under white lights.

On either side of the stage, two large banners hung—framing the otherwise simple scene of a table and two chairs into a grand sort of tableau—each bearing the Union Jack and the words _Great Britain (JCN)_ and the red Soviet flag with the golden hammer and sickle, followed by the words _USSR (Gredenko)._

Morse snorted softly at the sight of it all.

It was all just sport, really.

Wasn’t it odd how people seemed to need to make everything a competition? What did it mean to win? To lose? Whoever won or lost the match today, their nation’s flag would go on waving, just as it had the day before . . .

Well.

Until it didn’t.

At which point, the people of that nation would immediately hoist up another flag, with different colors or symbols. Or perhaps even resurrect an old flag from their past. Which one hardly mattered.

The game would continue under different colors, and the world would spin wearily on.

Morse sighed and folded his arms, resigning himself to whatever might happen in the days ahead. This was only the first of three matches, after all. Like it or no, he was in it for the long haul. 

At least all he had to do was to stand there, speak if he was spoken to, and be prepared to act in case of any emergency. Perhaps he might be required to deal with protestors hell-bent against the presence of Reds in Britain. Perhaps he might need to subdue some assassin determined to cause an international incident. He huffed a laugh. Any such disturbance would be as nothing compared to the trouble that could be caused by certain people who had been actually _invited_ to the proceedings, people such as ...

“I didn’t know your enthusiasms ran to chess,” said a voice in his ear.

Morse turned, caught off guard, and immediately scowled anew.

It was Miss Frazil, come in for the kill, just as he had feared. 

Immediately, Morse felt as if he had his back up. He had certainly come to regret it, asking Miss Frazil for help on that day long ago.

What a figure he must have cut, stumbling into her office in a pair of loose and an orderly’s stolen jacket, fresh from his escape from Bellevue. Morse cringed at the memory of it, even though, at the time, he had been grateful that she had believed in him. More than grateful. 

It was a shame, really, that he hadn’t realized, in his naiveté, the price tag attached. 

Because, since that day, Miss Frazil seemed to have fallen under the impression that she had an inside man at Cowley then and forever more. Any time that Morse thought that perhaps they might be allies after all—friends, even—she seemed to play that card, as if reminding him of his debt. It was an uneven dance, one that Morse just couldn't seem to get the hang of. 

“I don’t, usually,” Morse said, as frostily as he could, hoping to discourage her. “I’m here in an official capacity.”

“I see,” she said, nodding. Then she added, “Word is, you and Inspector Thursday were seen coming out of the Ashmolean yesterday.”

And there it was.

She was nothing if not predictable, at least.

“Is it?” Morse said.

“It would be terrible if something were to happen to the Romanov collection right during Professor Gredenko’s visit,” she observed.

“Mmmmmm,” Morse agreed. “Quite disastrous.”

“Is that all that you have, then?” she said.

“Mmmmmm.”

Surely, she could see there was more at stake here than a mere story. Ridiculous as the game was—as it had always been—it had, of late, turned deadly. It was hardly worth escalating tensions, ruining this tentative gesture of friendship, closing this narrow channel of communication, simply so she could sell a few more copies of the Oxford Mail, simply so she could keep her advertisers happy.

Out of the corner of his eye, Morse could see her mulling it over. And then he could see she was letting it go.

Not for good, mind you.

Only for now.

Morse released a breath he had not realized he had been holding, but then, before he could inhale anew, Miss Frazil was right back on track.

“I haven’t seen much of you since the Wessex Raid. When are you going to give me the inside story?”

This was the exchange then: she’d let the Ashmolean angle drop, in return for some juicy insider’s tale of the Wessex Bank Robbery.

“I’m sure you’ve spoken to everyone else,” Morse said, vaguely. 

“All except you and Inspector Thursday’s daughter. Fred didn’t say when she would be in.”

“She’s gone away,” Morse said.

And then his thoughts circled back to that word written at the bottom of the page in his notebook.

_Joan?_

Perhaps, if Joan returned, he might think of getting his own place. Perhaps it _was_ time for him to strike out on his own. There must be _something_ he could afford.

If he had his own flat, or even a small house, Tony could stop by whenever he liked. They’d have some space to inhabit at last, other than a picnic blanket on the shore of Lake Silence. They’d have an adult space, his own home, a place where they could be their own, new, grown-up selves, rather than two undergraduates perpetually caught out in the rain . . . 

He’d have to save quite a bit more but . . .

But it was all pointless to dream. He couldn’t leave the Thursdays now, not with such sadness in the house, not with such a cloud between them. It was as if his life had been put on hold for as long as Joan’s was.

“Are you alright?” Miss Frazil asked. “You look as if you lost weight. Not in love, are you?”

Morse looked up to the ceiling and rolled his eyes. “On my wages?” 

No. It was all a pipe dream. There was no way he could possibly afford his own place.

And then Morse startled. He thought it was only because he had been thinking of him, because he thought he saw . . .

“Morse? Are you quite sure you’re alright?” Miss Frazil asked once more.

She turned to follow his gaze.

“Oh. Look now. It’s our team, I suppose,” she said, wryly.

Mr. Bright and WPC Trewlove made their way over to join them, then, because there they were, the three researchers who made up the Joint Computing Nexus team, the men who Morse had secretly come to think of as Lovelace College’s own Three Billy Goats Gruff: Dr. Ellsworth, an elderly man with a white trim beard and silver walking stick taking up the lead, Dr. Updike, a man in his mid-thirties, with hard and piercing dark eyes, and Dr. Maxwell, who seemed to be barely out of school, boyish and sloppy, his heavy-framed glasses almost out of keeping with his face . . . and walking along with them, just as if he owned the place was . . .

Mr. Bright stepped forward as the English delegation approached. “Chief Superintendent Bright,” he said, extending his hand to greet the team.

“Dr. Ellsworth,” Ellsworth said, taking his offered hand. “Very pleased to meet you. And these are my colleagues, Dr. Updike and Dr. Maxwell.”

“How do you do,” Mr. Bright said, shaking each of their hands in turn.

“And, please,” Dr. Ellsworth said, stepping aside. “Allow me to introduce our patron, Anthony Donn. His foundation has been funding our research.”

“Chief Inspector Reginald Bright,” Mr. Bright said, with that special flourish that he saved for the higher-ups at division and the aristocracy. He always was a bit of a snob at heart.

“This is my driver, WPC Trewlove,” Mr. Bright said. “And this is Detective Constable . . .”

“Morse,” Tony said, taking his hand at once. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Ah,” Mr. Bright said, looking slightly perplexed. “You know each other?”

“Yes,” Morse allowed.

“Quite well, actually,” Tony said, seemingly delighted by Morse’s discomfort. “Very well, I'd have to say.”

Morse widened his eyes in alarm. Why on earth would Tony say such a thing, words so riddled with double entendre? He could almost see it in Mr. Bright’s sharp eyes, the wheels of his mind turning, puzzling it out, and the very last thing Morse needed was for him to come up with the correct answer.

Morse faltered, trying to think his way out of this corner, feeling rather like a bit of ham and tomato, sandwiched between two colliding worlds.Mr. Bright’s eyes darted once more between the two of them, when finally Tony offered it, the most innocent of explanations, all the more plausible because it was true.

“We were up together,” Tony said. “Roomed together third year.”

“Ah,” Mr. Bright said. “Good heavens. Why that’s splendid. Splendid.”

He most assuredly would not think it very splendid if he knew the whole truth of it. But, in the meantime, Morse could feel his stock rising so fast it made his head spin: first he was bowling over the Chief Superintendent with his barest smattering of Russian, and now, it transpired, he was old friends with the earl funding this whole wretched thing, on a first-name basis with him, even.

Or . . . well . . .

Half of a first-name basis, anyway.

“Dorothea Frazil, Oxford Mail,” Miss Frazil said, offering her hand to Tony. “Might I have a word?”

“Of course,” Tony said, and then he raised his arm as if to usher her away to a quieter corner.

Morse watched them darkly as they went. Not much escaped Miss Frazil’s notice. Tony’s little joke might well have delivered him right into the hands of his enemy. Miss Frazil would love nothing better than to be privy to such a tidbit, no doubt—no doubt she would think it would entitle her to rake him over the coals about a case whenever she liked forever more.

“Excuse me, officers,” Dr. Ellsworth said, then, before turning to lead the two researchers off to the side of the stage, off to where JCN awaited, its screen an eerie green grid, far greener than even the translucent leaves that wafted in the wind, casting moving shadows over the porch of Mrs. Chattox’s cottage.

In a few moments, Gredenko and Ellsworth came out onto the stage and shook hands, and it all seemed pleasant enough as they sat down at the table together, just two old friends come for a casual game on an autumn morning.

Gredenko made his move and hit the timer, and then, off to the right of the stage, Dr. Maxwell pressed a few buttons and waited, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

JCN’s screen blinked in response, and a letter on the grid flashed, turning from green on black to black on green. Dr. Ellsworth nodded and moved a knight forward with a deft little hopping motion, just as though it were an actual horse.

Professor Gredenko rubbed his long fingers across his chin, betraying his nervousness.

It might sound unpatriotic, he supposed, but Morse found himself rooting for the Soviet. No wonder the man was anxious. He wasn’t playing only for his own country—was he?—but for all of humanity.

Could the human mind—in all of its beauty and horror, in all of its depths an extremes—beat its own creation?

And if it couldn’t, then what did that mean for the future? 

Morse folded his arms and twisted his mouth, holding himself back from giving into the deep frown that worked to form on his face. The match seemed to go on and on, punctuated with clicks much like the ticking of a clock: the timer button hit by Dr. Ellsworth and Professor Gredenko in steady and unsteady turns, the flip of JCN’s switch, the snap of the photographers’ cameras.

“There will now be a short break,” Dr. Updike announced at last, and, at once, the Russian rose from his chair and went down the steps of the stage, as if he would like nothing better than to have a breath of fresh air.

“Interesting, isn’t it?” Tony said, sliding up to him in the crowd as though it were the most natural thing in the world. 

Morse darted a quick look around, considering who might be in earshot, before posing his next question, a question that any typical police constable might not have the right to demand from the chairman of a highly-moneyed foundation. 

“Why didn’t you say?” Morse asked, his voice a hiss of a whisper. “You never said you were involved in any of this.”

Tony shrugged. “It’s not entirely philanthropic. It’s a bit of an investment as well. Think of all the commercial uses such technology might be put to use to some day?”

“I can’t think of one,” Morse protested.

“Oh, really? I can think of several,” Tony countered. “And at any rate,” he laughed, “One has to do _something_ with one’s money. It certainly beats buying jewels and sewing them into my skirts.”

Morse widened his eyes in horror at Tony’s words. He couldn’t possibly know about.... 

“It’s a joke, Morse,” Tony said. “Don’t you remember? Last night? When I mentioned the Romanovs?”

“Oh,” Morse said.

“For God’s sakes, what is it now?” Tony asked.

“Nothing,” Morse said.

Tony laughed again, a laugh that floated light as a feather amidst the ponderous dark cloud of tension that seemed to hang over the room. “How funny you are. You might have thought I walked across your grave.”

“Hmmmm,” Morse said.

And now that Tony had mentioned the previous night, Morse realized he should have known that Tony might have something to do with this.

_“So I suppose you are all quite busy with our Soviet comrades in town,” Tony said. “I've heard they are practically crawling all over Oxford. I should have foreseen that.”_

_Foreseen_ _what_? Morse might well have asked. Although now it was all too clear. Tony had known about this all long ago, long before Mr. Bright had handed him the assignment.

“Well. It looks like it’s going swimmingly for Jason,” Tony said.

“Hmmmm,” Morse said, a hint of disapproval in his voice.

Tony looked at him, surprised. “I thought you would approve of this sort of thing. Progress sweeping away the cobwebs of superstition, and so forth.”

Tony’s words called to mind at once the odd hangings, ropes of macramé like spiders’ webs, threading across Mrs. Chattox’s sunbright window, where the leaves outside swayed in the wind as they had always done, immune to the encroachment of the power plant, of “surveyors and water people,” deep in a world that time had passed over.

“Not _everything_ needs to be swept away,” Morse said.

Tony regarded him for a moment, a quizzical expression on his face.

“Besides,” Morse added. “I can think quite well enough for myself, thank you. I don’t need . . .” and here, his voice went dark, despite himself, “a machine to do it for me. It can’t ever hope to replace the . . . ”

Morse frowned and looked down at his shoes, scrubbing up the curls at his nape, suddenly uncomfortable under Tony's inquisitive gaze. 

“Come on,” Tony said, at last. “Let’s get a bite, shall we?”

Morse’s frown deepened at that. Did Tony really think that he was free to leave? To simply come and go from the job as he pleased? 

But then he noticed that Tony was gesturing towards a passageway that led into the next room, which Morse saw at once—to his absolute horror—was filled with a long banquet table, blanketed with platters of steaming hors d’oeuvres, cucumber sandwiches, and bouquet-like towers of fruit, chunks of pineapple and grapes and wedges of pastel orange and green and pink melon. Even worse, in another corner of the room, a mahogany bar had been set up, gleaming with decanters of Scotch and dark bottles of wine, behind which two bartenders were working to fill glass after glass. 

He could only imagine Jakes’ face if word of this got out.

Morse stiffened. “I can’t. I’m on duty.”

“You don’t have to down an entire bottle of Glenfiddich,” Tony protested. “Just come and have a drink and a bite. You’re supposed to be representing the city, aren’t you? Working the room a bit, keeping tabs on things? And it’s not as if you have time for lunch later? I mean other than . . . Thursday, isn’t it? . . . your ham and tomato?”

Morse blinked, confused. The last line he had phrased almost as a question.

And.

Oh.

It was a question.

Merely a coded one for any of the crowd within earshot, any one who might be too keyed in on their conversation.

“Yes,” Morse agreed. “I mean, no. No, I won’t have time.”

And he really didn’t. There was the sapphire brooch and Laxman’s glasses and Joan and . . .

But Tony didn’t look disappointed. Quite the contrary, he looked as if he didn’t expect otherwise, and Morse felt an odd sort of lump form in his throat, even as he tried to smile.

There was some question there that he needed to ask. But what was the question? And to whom should he pose it? Should he ask it of Mrs. Chattox’s cards? Transcribe it into binary, set it onto a punch-card for JCN?

He was tempted then, to pull his notebook from out of his pocket, to add Tony’s name to the page after Joan’s. And, indeed, his hand flew to his pocket and then froze into place.

Somehow, he doubted that Tony would very much appreciate it, feeling as if he was just one more thing to be added to the list of all the problems that it was down to him to solve.

So he simply added it to the other list, the one that he kept locked up, safely in his head.

***

Morse stalked down the pavement, the swish of his gray car coat striking up against he back of his legs, keeping up with his angry stride.

What a bloody awful day.

Thursday’s bad temper and Gull working a crossword just as easy as you please and that awful chess match where he was hounded by Miss Frazil and caught up in the awful collision of worlds in the awkward meeting of Mr. Bright and Tony, a wretched visit to the Wessex Bank to inquire about the accounts of Ronald Beavis, Alicia Collins and Matthew Copley-Barnes—the first time he had set foot in the place since the robbery—and then, to top all, a useless, contentious visit to the Ashmolean.

No one there had anything useful to say. Everyone got on. Copley-Barnes could be a bit much, but that’s how all academics were, weren’t they?

Morse’s idea that someone might take the gem to impress a wife or girlfriend was deemed laughable. 

“Who would do such a thing? My wife would just say, ‘what am I supposed to do with this?’ huffed one of the guards. “She’d rather I buy her one of those dishwashers they’re all so on about.”

“Mine wants a three piece suite for the bath. Pink. Can you imagine?” said another. And they all broke into laughter.

And then, when he tried to have a shufti around Mr. Copley-Barnes office, who should come in but the man himself?

“I intended to have a word with the Chief Superintendent about you,” Copley-Barnes said. And then, coming closer, with an auditory sniff, “Have you been _drinking_?”

And here Morse had been, trying to help the man out, lest perhaps he was being framed. He couldn’t believe, with the way the man behaved, that there wasn’t some disgruntled employee under his supervision.

But fine, let the great Mr. Copley-Barnes report him. He was in Mr. Bright’s good books these days anyway. 

Morse thrust his hands deep in the pockets of his car coat and kept on, barely cognizant of where he was going, when he realized his steps had brought him right in front of the record shop. 

He ground to a halt and looked longingly into the shop window.

If he wanted to try for his own place, every shilling counted. But . . . 

But surely he deserved _something_ after such a trying day.

He dithered, for a moment, out on the pavement and then went through the door, drawing once more to a stop as soon as he stepped inside. 

Behind the counter was a girl with dark hair threaded with a silk blue scarf. She looked up and for just a moment, her dramatically lined eyes widened, but then she recovered herself and quirked a rueful smile.

“Hello, stranger,” she said.

“Joan,” Morse said.


	6. Chapter 6

“Hello, stranger,” Joan said.

Morse could scarcely believe it.

Had she really been here, then? Working in a record shop on Turl Street, right under their noses, all along?

“Joan,” he said, approaching the counter in a few quick strides. “You’ve been here in Oxford, all this time? Why haven’t you rung?”

Joan’s bright lipstick smile faded at once into wary retreat, and the welcome in her eyes withered with it.

“Now don’t you start,” she said.

“But. Your parents. They’ve been so worried. Why haven’t you ... ”

She exhaled sharply, then, clearly exasperated with him before he had even begun.

“Morse. It’s nothing for you to go sticking your nose in, alright? It’s naught to do with you. I just . . . I’ve just needed some time to myself, that’s all.”

“Time for _what?”_ Morse exclaimed.

A balding man poked his head out of the back office, then, as if to see what was amiss. The manager no doubt.

Well. Morse certainly wouldn’t get anywhere convincing Joan to come round if he started off by getting her into trouble with her boss. Morse followed Joan’s cue and smiled vacantly at the man, as Joan gave him a half-wave, reassuring him that all was well. The man studied them for a moment, scowled in disapproval, and then ducked back through the doorway.

Morse took a few steps closer and lowered his voice.

“Sorry,” he said. “I just don’t understand. I don’t understand why you haven’t rung them.”

And how could he ever understand? She had a loving family, just waiting for her to come home, hoping to be reunited with her again.

Joan pursued her mouth thoughtfully for a moment.

“It’s like I’ve said. I’ve just needed some time, to think things through. To decide what I want to do in life. Without them offering a ‘helpful suggestion’ every other minute. I . . . I just don’t want to live a life where everything I do bounces back on them, alright?”

Morse eased out of his accusatory stance and sighed. He could read it there, between the lines.

What she said was “bounce back on them.”

But what she meant was, “bounce back on _him.”_

“The robbery,” Morse said.

Well. It had to be that.

An odd twist flitted at the corner of Joan’s mouth, as she looked down, busily unrolling a poster of a pop band dressed in ridiculous red jackets resembling nothing so much as nineteenth-century military uniforms, gaudily emblazoned with gold brocade all along the sleeves and around the collars.

“It’s not your fault, you know,” Morse said.

“Oh? Isn’t it?”

“No,” Morse said. “I was there, too, you know. I couldn’t save Ronnie. I couldn’t do all that much at all, really. And it was my _job_ to do something.”

Joan’s eyes snapped up at that.

“You kept your head. You kept us safe. You tricked Cole Matthews into giving Dad a chance to take that shot.”

She shook her head, then, as if trying to rid herself of the thought of it, her dark hair glossy under the bright shop lights as she swayed it briskly from side to side.

“You didn’t tell Paul Marlock all the inner workings of the bank schedule,” she murmured.

“I’m sure he made it all seem an innocent enough question at the time. How could you have known?” Morse asked.

For a moment, Joan looked uncertain.

“I . . . I _should_ have, that’s all. Dad wouldn’t have trusted that man. Neither would you.”

Morse winced at her use of the term.

_That man._

Perhaps everyone had someone in their lives who popped up out of the blue on some quiet Wednesday morning and turned everything upside down? Someone whom later they could scarcely bear to name?

Joan looked down, then, and murmured, “A detective inspector’s daughter,” half in disgust, as if to indict herself even further.

“We all have moments, when we falter. When we make mistakes,” Morse countered. “He was very charming, I’m sure.”

Joan snorted. She gathered up the poster and went over to a wall where a barrage of promotional prints and placards hung in a riot of rainbow color. It was as if a psychedelic cloud had blown in though the door and rained all over it.

Or—more aptly, in Morse’s opinion—as if a psychedelic cat had vomited all over it.

Joan unrolled the poster and held it aloft, as if deciding where to place it, while Morse stood there, scrubbing up the waves at the back of his nape, feeling as if he had been handily dismissed.

He suddenly wished he was someone else, _anyone_ else, someone who …

Well.

Someone who knew how to _talk_ to people. 

“Can’t you?” Morse asked, at last.

“Can’t I what?” Joan replied.

“Can’t you just give them a ring, at least. It’s just . . . they’re worried.”

“Shows you what they think of me, then,” Joan said, tearing off a double-sided piece of cellotape. “I’m a big girl, Morse. I can take care of myself well enough.”

“It’s not that. It’s …”

“What?” Joan asked, and he could tell once more that her patience with him was waning.

“Well. They have to sit there, every night, and look at me, don’t they?”

She turned around and gave him an elaborate once-over, as if scrutinizing him from head to toe.

“Well, you’re no Nick Wilding, but you’re not bad to look at, either. You’ll do, Morse. It’s not as if you’ve got three heads.”

Morse exhaled sharply out of his mouth, releasing a swoosh of air that was audible, trying to decompress the tension rising within him.

Because how to say it? How to make clear what he meant?

“It’s . . . that’s not what I meant, Joan,” he said, lowering his voice. “It’s … How can they look at me … and not think … How can they not think of how I disappeared, too, and … and no one ever looked for me ... and ... I was . . . ”

And was she really going to make him spell it out?

But no.

Instead, it was as if all of the fight had gone out of her. She turned around and, to Morse’s surprise, she put her hand, warm and soft, to the side of his face.

“Morse,” she said. “It’s nothing to do with that. It’s not the same thing at all.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No,” she said. “I think…” She took a deep breath. “You can’t tie everything back to that.”

“No?”

“No.”

Morse turned away. He was supposed to let it all recede in the rearview mirror, he supposed. Just that easy.

She was her father’s daughter, stubborn and set and single-minded, through and through.

Little wonder they rowed so much.

“Besides. I’ll get in touch,” she said, softly, as if to reassure him. “I just need time, that’s all. I have to prove to myself that I can be my own person, that I can get by on my own.”

“You can do that and still give them a ring,” Morse protested.

“I will.”

“When?” he asked.

She looked at him sharply.

“… Do you think that might be?” he amended.

“Eventually. When I’ve had some time to... to put it behind me. And in the meantime, they’ve got Sam. And you.”

Morse shook his head. As if life had been easy for him and for Sam, since she had upped and disappeared. As if they hadn’t had to witness Mrs. Thursday’s hidden tears, as if they hadn’t had to suffer Thursday’s dark moods.

Although . . . perhaps . . . If she wouldn’t come back for her parents’ sake…

“That’s just it, isn’t it?” Morse cried. “With you gone, he’s driving us mad as well. He’s in an awful temper, your father.”

But Joan only laughed at that. “Dad’s all bluster. Besides, what’s he angry at Sam for? Sam knows full well how to go under Dad’s radar.”

“He wants to join the Army, Sam. And your dad’s none too keen on it.”

Joan huffed another laugh. “Is that all? He’ll get over that. I know he wanted something different for him, but he’s proud of him all the same. And besides. He’s got you to follow along in his footsteps, hasn’t he? You’ll be a sergeant in a few years. Then Inspector. You’ll get married, buy a house just down the street, have kids. You’ll put on weight, take up smoking a pipe ...” she smiled, then, mischievously. “In a couple of years, we won’t be able to tell the two of you apart.”

“Now don’t make that face, Morse,” Joan said, then, blithely continuing on, even though he had done no such thing.

Or . . . at least . . . he hadn’t _thought_ that he had.

“There’s no reason why you shouldn’t marry,” she said. “You’ll find someone, I’m sure. There’s someone for everyone, you know. You just need to try to get on better with people. You just need to give them the chance to . . .”

And then she went still, her big, blue, dramatically-lined eyes widening in surprise.

“You devil. You’ve already got someone,” she said.

“What?” Morse asked.

She slapped him lightly on the side of his arm. “You do. I could see it on your face. How long have you been holding out on me?”

“Joan.”

“Come on, then. Do I know her? You _have_ kept it a secret, haven’t you? You hardly ever leave the house, it seems, unless it’s to go driving or out to some concert with ….”

And then her eyes flew open all the wider, as wide as two, twin, blue flying saucers. 

“What is it?” he asked.

“Are you mad?” she gasped.

“What do you mean?” Morse asked, cautiously.

She looked about the shop, then, unnecessarily as there was no one else in there at that odd time in the afternoon, and then she mouthed one word.

_Tony?_

Morse’s heart jumped up to his throat.

What had he done?

Was he that transparent?

How had she managed to jump from point to point, following only the map revealed by the expression on his face?

He looked down, sharply, down at his shoes, so that she couldn’t read anything else there, as she put her hand around his upper arm, drawing him in. 

“Morse,” she said. “This is important, now. You should … I hope you know. You can’t let anyone at Cowley know, alright? And don’t let mum or dad know, either. Especially Dad.”

“Your dad already knows.”

 _“What?_ ” Joan asked, a hint of panic in her voice, even though she kept it to a whisper. “When? How? How did he find out?”

Morse shrugged.

“He’s known from the very beginning.”

 _“What?_ When was this?”

“On . . . on my birthday. Two years ago. When you went to my concert. Your mother wanted to have the cake all lit up when I came in, and your father was looking out the window . . . and . . . Well . . . .”

Morse shrugged. She didn’t need to know all the details, but he could tell by the way that she slapped her hand over her mouth that she could surmise them all the same. 

The idea that her father had somehow gotten wind of it and said nothing was one thing; the fact that he had actually caught them _in flagrante delicto_ was something quite else. 

“Two years?” Joan hissed. “And he hasn’t said anything?”

And that was just Morse’s point.

“Oh, he’s said plenty, especially since you’ve been gone. I went to make up a four with Strange, out with his girl’s cousin to a pub, out with a woman I had never even _met_ before, and he was practically writing out the engagement announcements when I got home.”

Joan’s eyes wavered over his face. He could see it there, in their depths, that reassessment. What she thought of him, what she thought of her father.

Morse frowned. How did this get round to him, anyway?

And Joan, it seemed, could sense that, too. 

“I’m, I’m sorry, Morse. I was just surprised, is all. I thought you were engaged before, to a girl you knew when you were up.”

“That’s just what your father said.”

“Sorry.”

“Just. It’s fine. It’s ….”

But how could he tell what it was? When he did not know himself? But, of course, now that she knew, she’d want him to talk about it. She was a great one to encourage and pester others to talk about their feelings, even though she never seemed to apply that rule to herself.

It seemed far past time to change the subject.

“Can I … can I tell them I saw you at least? You know you want to come home.”

The softness in her eyes hardened at once.

“Oh? Do I?” Joan said.

“Of course. Why else would you choose to work in a record shop? You didn’t think I might come in here someday and run into you?”

“Oh. Well. That’s me all figured out, isn’t it? It couldn’t be because I needed a job and there was a sign in the window, could it?”

Morse snorted. “I’m sure there were plenty of other places. Boutiques and so forth.”

“That’s right,” Joan said, half-mockingly. “I should be selling pretty frocks and high-heeled pumps, right? What would I know about music?”

“Well…” Morse said.

Perhaps it wasn’t diplomatic, exactly, to point that fact out, but seeing as she had said it herself ... 

Joan scowled. “You know, you can be a real pill sometimes.”

“Joan,” Morse said. “It’s no use pretending. You know it’s true. It hardly takes a Sigmund Freud to see your motives all too clear.”

“There you go again,” she said. “We all know you’re smart. You don’t have to _prove_ it all of the time.”

Well. That just went to show what she knew. For all her astuteness, for all of her insights into human nature, there, she was woefully off the mark.

Of course, he had to prove it. He had to prove it every day.

How else could he convince himself that he would never again be so stupid, so unforgivably stupid, as to cave before anyone else in the way he had done before that man, to lull himself into believing such lies? To give up on even asking the first question? To allow himself to be driven into that bleak and passive hopelessness that had gone on and on and . . .

He spun on his heel and stormed to the door.

He had just put his hand on the handle, when he drew up short, and turned round again.

How had it all gone so wrong? He had been so pleased to see her. And she had seemed happy enough to see him. He hadn’t meant for it all to go as it had.

It was just something that …. something that seemed to happen to him, whether he willed it or no.

“Joan,” he said. “Please.”

“Please what?” Joan said.

“Don’t make me lie to them.”

The fire in her Joan’s eyes died out at once, replaced with a twist of compassion, as she relaxed her soldier-like stance.

It was all well and good for her—she was their own daughter, sharing a lifetime’s worth of those sweet and simple ties that bind.

But as for himself—the Thursdays had taken him in solely on trust, without knowing a thing about him, not even his name.

It seemed a poor return for all the faith they had put in him to keep a secret like this.

“Alright,” she sighed. “You’re right there. But just give me a day, alright? Let me ring mum, and talk to her first. Let me diffuse things a bit. Then I’ll come round tomorrow night for tea.”

“Will you? Will you really?” Morse said.

“Yes. Really,” she said.

Morse smiled, a little lopsidedly, and turned back towards the door.

“And Morse?” she called.

“Yes?”

“Do me a favor and steer clear of Dad, as much as you can, in the meanwhile.”

“Why?”

She grinned, rather ruefully. “He’ll be able to see something’s up, just from the look on your face.”

“Hmmmm,” Morse said, rolling his eyes as he pushed open the door. “I shouldn’t worry about that. We have so many things on right now, he won’t be able to tell what means what.”

And then he went out onto the pavement, letting the door swing shut as he passed through, leaving a questioning Joan behind him.

Which wasn’t so bad, really.

If she was curious enough, it might be one more thing to prompt her to come to tea.

Morse smiled quietly to himself.

Perhaps he did know people after all.

***

As Morse walked along the colorful storefronts of Turl Street, he pulled his notebook out from his jacket pocket and flipped it open.

There it all was, the list he had compiled that morning.

Puzzle after puzzle after puzzle. 

There was Matthew Laxman, the botanist, whom Mrs. Chattox had believed was _not_ a botanist, who had disappeared five years ago this September.

Despite having been somewhat of a fixture of the village that summer, no one in Bramford seemed to have seen him at all during the month that he had disappeared, even though, by all accounts, that had been where he was last headed. 

Could it be because he had never made it that far?

The power plant was only a few miles up the road from Bramford, and yet it seemed that County had not bothered to inquire there, as there was nothing on file. Certainly, there had to be a way for a police officer to gain access to the place, to ask a few questions. He made a mental note to call around, to see how he might be admitted through the gates.

Then, there was the sapphire brooch—the brooch that Tsar Nicholas II had given to Alix of Hesse and by Rhine upon the occasion of their marriage—the brooch that had been stolen from the Ashmolean.

The last three people known to be anywhere near the jewel were Matthew Copley-Barnes, the appallingly condescending curator, Ronald Beavis, the night watchman, who seemed to spend the bulk of his eventless days in his grim bedsit, with only records and a bottle of Scotch for company, and Alicia Collins, the postgrad, whose plant-filled bower and romantic tales seemed to glow with a hope that poor old Beavis had evidently lost long ago, somewhere along the way.

If, indeed, he had ever cherished a spark of hope at all. 

And was he, Morse, losing his, too? Just as he had found it again? Was he well on his way to following along right in Beavis’ lonely footsteps? The parallels between them—their careers, their tastes in music, their predilections for crosswords and Scotch—were eerily uncanny.

There were weeks when Morse felt as if he had come so far. And then there were weeks like these, when he felt as if he was going in circles, just like the concentric circles he had scribbled around the name at the end of his notes, the name he had circled as he had come down the stairs that morning.

_Joan._

He pulled out a pen and then moved to cross out the name, but then, he hesitated.

Better to wait until she actually showed up.

Although, he thought to himself, it wasn’t as if he didn’t know where to find her. 

He tucked his notebook back into his jacket and sighed.

It had been a longer day than any he could remember of late. And the evening wasn’t looking to be any better.

And, to top all, he had been so distracted in the shop, that he hadn’t even bought the new record he’d been wanting. 

******

Thursday set his tea cup and saucer down and pulled out a chair at the table, where Morse was sitting in his usual corner, looking as subdued as he had during the first days he had come to live amongst them, his shoulders slouched as if to make himself as small as possible. It was almost as if he were trying to blend into the white and gold patterned wallpaper behind him.

“You’re awfully quiet.” Thursday observed.

“Mmmm,” Morse said.

“Who won the first round?”

“Hmmm?”

“The chess match.”

“Oh,” Morse said, glumly. “The computer.”

Thursday took a meditative sip from his cup. He hadn’t forgotten the despairing look Morse had given JCN on the day they had gone round to the colleges to meet the research team. The whole idea of a machine that might have spared him five years of silence and calculations and isolation had to strike a bit of a chord with Morse, he supposed.

Still, it seemed as if he had done well enough that day, as far as he had heard from the chief superintendent.

“Mr. Bright seemed right pleased with you,” Thursday offered. “He said you knew the chairman of the foundation that’s been funding the research over at Lovelace. That you had been at Oxford together.”

“Mmmmm,” Morse said.

Well. That had to be it.

“Oh, how nice,” Win said, coming into the room to set a plate of rolls before them. “An old friend of yours?”

“Yes,” Morse said.

Of course, Win got an actual word, right on the first go. 

“It wasn’t too awkward, was it?” Thursday asked, hesitantly.

Morse looked up at him, sharply, so sharply that he suddenly felt as if he were under the surveillance of two blue spotlights.

“Why do you say that?”

“Oh, I dunno. Having to account for where you’ve been all these years. Catching up and so forth.”

“Oh,” Morse said. “No. He didn’t ask about any of that,” he added, a bit evasively.

Thursday considered him for a long moment.

Then what _was_ the trouble, then?

But Morse, it seemed, had reached his limit, and he ducked his head down once more, almost seeming to sag with relief when Sam breezed in, full of stories about his day.

****

Professor Yuri Gredenko and Dr. Henry Ellsworth sat face to face, their heads bowed, the chessboard a simple boxwood and rosewood battlefield between them.

Off to one side of the stage, Dr. Scott Updike fed a hole-punched card into a slot, pressed a sequence of buttons, and then stepped back, looking up at the grid of electric green letters glowing unnaturally on the grey screen.

Morse watched, his arms folded, scowling in disapproval as the letters began to flash, leaving only one letter—representing the Joint Computing Nexus’ next move—blinking from green on a square of black to black on a square of green.

Just that easy.

How could the damn thing be so sure? It seemed to strive so little in its labors.

“Hello, Morse.”

Morse turned, on the spot, surprised. He had been so absorbed in the match, that he had not heard Miss Frazil’s approach.

It felt strange, the realization, considering how once he had listened so carefully for any footstep—for any sound from beyond the small, white door.

“Hello,” Morse said.

She gestured, then, to a wavy-haired man who was standing beside her and smiling a white beam of a smile, much like one saw on toothpaste advertisements.

“This is a friend of mine, Ken Finn,” she said. “Ken, this is my friend, Morse.”

Morse startled at that, unsure for a moment as to how to formulate a reply. 

It was the same swooping feeling of temporary disorientation he had felt when Jim Strange had introduced him to his girl and her cousin, down at the pub.

Had Miss Frazil said . . . 

Did she consider them to be _friends?_

“Ken writes who-done-its,” she explained.

“Crime fiction,” he corrected. “Please.”

Inwardly, Morse cringed.

Didn’t matter much what you called it, really. It was all hackneyed codswallop all the same. Same trite plot as a hundred other such books, all the answers evident by page 43.

“He’d like to pick your brains,” Miss Frazil explained.

Morse snorted.

“Such as they are.”

“Don’t be deceived,” Miss Frazil protested. “Morse is the cleverest man in Oxford.”

“Oh. Cut to the quick,” Finn groaned. 

“Second cleverest, then,” she assured him, “now you’re here.”

Morse could scarcely refrain from rolling his eyes.

Personally, Morse quite thought this was one fish Miss Frazil ought to toss back into the lake.

But then, who was he to give advice?

“You play? Finn asked.

“Yes. A little. You?”

“Some. That’s why I’m here. Research for the next book. I’ve rented a place for the summer. You should come by. Dorothea says you were at Lonsdale. I was a Loggins man myself. Red brick and chippie with everything.”

“Hmmmmm,” Morse said.

“So, I’ll hold you to it.”

“To what?” Morse asked.

“That you’ll come by some evening? Have dinner with Dorothea and me?”

“Oh,” Morse said. “Alright. I suppose I could.”

Perhaps he might have a _few_ ideas, actually. 

For example, why not write a book in which the culprit was someone a little less obvious for once?

Why not a tiger?

That, at least, might put a twist on things.

Or perhaps they needn't be all so hard-boiled, those books. Perhaps there might be one with a bit of a Gothic spin. Perhaps there might be a ghost, haunting an old school . . . but it wouldn’t _really_ be a ghost, of course, and ... . . .

“I’ve got a bottle of Glenfiddich just waiting for the right occasion. Perhaps you can give me a few tips.”

Morse narrowed his eyes, then, distracted by an odd little drama playing out in a quiet corner on the other side of the hall. Even as the Who-Done-It man was prattling on, Morse noticed that, far off to the side of the stage, Thomas Maxwell, the youngest member of the JCN team—the smallest of billy goats gruff, the one with the heavy glasses and the mop of blondish, pop-star hair—was deep in conversation with one of the Soviet researchers, a young woman in a forest green blazer, with thick, dark hair done up in a twist. At once, they both looked up, darting glances about the room as if to check to see if anyone was watching, and then they spun off, striding side by side out through a doorway and down a deserted corridor.

“Please,” Morse said, “You’ll have to excuse me.”

And then he started off across the room, the match and Miss Frazil and her friend all utterly forgotten, as if to follow.

Where were they going? Some of the men in dark suits were standing nearby, their posture ramrod straight, their hands clasped before them, but the fact that one of the Soviet researchers—who—let’s face it—they were there to keep an eye on—had absconded with one of her English counterparts seemed entirely to have escaped their notice. Likewise, Dr. Ellsworth and Dr. Updike were busily engaged in the match, seemingly unaware that the junior member of the team had scuttled off, right in the middle of the proceedings.

What could they be up to? Not trading in state secrets, surely? Morse hadn’t the slightest idea what it all might be about—but if anything were to happen . . .

“Morse,” called a familiar voice.

Morse stopped short and turned around.

“Tony,” he said.

“Is everything alright? You look a bit frazzled.”

“It’s ... it’s Maxwell. He just took off down the hallway with one of the Soviet researchers. They looked all about, and then they ran off. Simply made a break for it.”

To Morse’s surprise, Tony laughed.

Morse looked at him sharply. Although he was here, on the surface, to represent the city, his real job was to provide security, to make sure all went smoothly. Thus far, they had managed to keep the theft of the Romanov brooch—which had been on loan from a museum in Leningrad— safely out of the press, but if something were to happen to one of the visiting Soviets, it was impossible to imagine how tensions might escalate. It was a serious business, one that could have serious consequences. Hardly a laughing matter. 

“You mean Romeo and Yulia?” Tony asked.

Morse paused. What was Tony getting at?

“I noticed them yesterday, making eyes at one another over the fruit tray. Poor things. Last time I passed by them, they were having an impassioned discussion of some sort of Rice Theorem.”

“Rice’s Theorem,” Morse corrected. “It states that all non-trivial semantic properties of programs are undecidable.”

“Well, I’d leave them to it, whatever it is. I’m not sure if I’ve heard anything duller in all my life. Still. Just goes to show there’s someone for everyone, I suppose.”

“Hmmmm,” Morse said.

That was just what Joan had said, yesterday at the record shop. And perhaps it was true. 

Because Morse agreed with Tony there. He didn’t particularly care to discuss Rice’s theorem, either.

“Come on,” Tony said. “Let’s have a Scotch.”

Yes, perhaps there was something to it.

Because Tony had practically read his mind, hadn’t he?

Morse stole one last glance over his shoulder, watching the now-empty doorway through which the researchers had disappeared. If that’s what it was all about, he didn’t really have the heart to interfere.

“All right,” Morse said. Technically, he was on duty, but it wouldn’t hurt to have one drink. He _was_ here in a diplomatic capacity of sorts, as well, one supposed. He was _expected_ to work the room a bit, as Tony had pointed out the day before. And besides . . .

“It will be nice to take a break from watching _that,”_ he added, nodding sharply to the stage.

“You don’t like Jason, do you?” Tony asked.

“I wish people would stop calling it that.”

“Why?”

“It’s not a person,” Morse said, exasperated. “It doesn’t need a name.”

“Sort of has a face,” Tony countered.

“No. No, it doesn’t.”

“Yes. Look there. The reels of tape look a bit like two eyes, and that row of buttons along the bottom are a bit like teeth, as if it has a sort of scarecrow smile.”

“That’s only an effect of pareidolia,” Morse said. 

“I beg your pardon,” Tony replied, taking his elbow to lead him off though the crowd, off towards the bar. “I’ve never been paranoid a day in my life. I’m absolutely delighted when people talk about me. Can hardly think of a more interesting subject, really.”

“No,” Morse said. “Not _paranoia._ Pareidolia. It’s the perception of a specific pattern in something that is essentially quite different. Like how people might imagine they see the man in the moon, for instance. In reality, it’s not a face at all, only the coincidental alignment of craters.”

“Is it?” Tony asked. “How utterly disappointing.”

Morse shook his head. It was hopeless. Tony always talked such nonsense.

Sometimes it was endearing, especially when Morse realized he did it on purpose, playing the dimwitted blueblood, endeavoring to pull him out of the doldrums, forcing him to quirk a reluctant, if annoyed, smile.

Sometimes it was just trying as hell.

“Honestly, though,” Tony said. “I wouldn’t have figured you for such a Luddite. Technology has made great advances for people, you know. Are you opposed to the telephone, too, for example?”

“No,” Morse said. “A telephone is merely an instrument for our use. I just ... I just don’t like the idea of such a thing taking the _place_ of people, I suppose. We’ll continue on, building machines to do _this_ for us, and then _that,_ and then _that_. And then, the next thing we know, there will come a time when they can do everything, when they can manage all of the little practicalities that make the wheels of the economy turn. And then, what happens, what value will be assigned to all the things that they _can’t_ do? Anything else—music or art or poetry—will be seen as second-class, a waste of time. And, even worse, people will come to depend on the press of the button, rather than relying on their own minds. Use not, want not, as they say.”

“I think it’s ‘waste not, want not.’”

“Is it?

“Yes.”

“Oh,” Morse said.

They sidled up to the bar, then, and Tony handed him off a tumbler of Scotch. Morse closed his eyes and drank, relishing in the contrast of the sweetness on his tongue and the burn in his throat—as well as the beginnings of the pleasant haziness that followed.

He hadn’t had a thing to eat all day, so desperate had he been to get out of the house that morning, so anxious had he been to avoid breakfast with the Thursdays at all costs. It was too difficult, far too difficult, even to think of sitting there, watching their solemn and distressed and worn faces, knowing all the while that he held the key, that he carried the secret, that with a mere handful of words, he could relieve all of their fears.

_“I ran into Joan yesterday...”_

He tipped the glass back, draining it, and then stilled for a moment, exchanging pointed glances with Tony.

Out in the main hall, it seemed as if an odd sort of hush had fallen over the crowd, one that bespoke of a tension far greater than any torrent of noise and uproar might have done.

They left the bar and went back out to where the crowd of spectators stood, looking up at the silent tableau of the two men leaning over the chessboard, framed by banners bearing the British and Soviet flags.

Yuri Gredenko sat with his fingers steepled, seemingly bemused, whereas Dr. Ellsworth was hunched over the board, clearly tense, straining to keep his face carefully neutral. Off to the side, Dr. Updike stood watching the steadily glowing green grid, aghast with disbelief. There was no flashing, no blinking. It seemed as if the thing was stuck, as if it were a record with a bad skip.

“What is it?” he whispered, coming to stand alongside Miss Frazil.

“Jason has been thinking of his next move for forty minutes. Professor Gredenko has him beaten by time alone,” she murmured.

Morse glanced up at the clock. He’d been so distracted by it all—by the who-done-it novelist and the runaway lovebirds, and well, Tony—that he had scarcely realized how much time had passed.

“Oh,” Morse said. “Bad luck.”

Updike turned around, his dark eyebrows drawn, glaring out into the audience crossly. Morse's voice had carried through the silent, expectant crowds far more loudly than he had intended. He looked away, only to see Mr. Bright was staring at him, too, a frown of disapproval across his stern and wizened face.

Morse swallowed, and, careful to avoid anyone else’s gaze, he looked up to the clock, which was ticking steadily down.

40 seconds.

30 seconds.

A human would make a move at this point, any move. Any move, after all, was better than none, any move might at least buy some time.

20 seconds.

10.

And then.

It was over.

The two men stood up and shook hands over the chess board. Professor Gredenko’s smile was polite but constrained—it was hardly the most victorious way to win a match, after all—but Morse could hardly hide his snort of a laugh, half-joyous, half-relieved.

Tony was looking at him, bemused.

“Sorry,” Morse said.

“Whatever for?”

“It’s your investment, isn’t it? I shouldn’t have sounded so . . .”

“Jubilant?” Tony asked, laughing.

Morse shrugged.

“It’s just something I’ve been toying around with. It’s not as if I have any _real_ money tied up in the thing. I’m just surprised you should hate it so. You’re hardly a traditionalist.”

“I don’t _hate_ it, exactly … I just don’t think it’s a particularly good idea.”

“Well, I don’t agree with you there. If we can build machines to perform our more mundane tasks, surely that will free up humans to have more time for all of those lovely intangibles you mentioned. I just don’t understand why you should mistrust it so.”

Morse tugged on his ear and turned away.

How else could he explain it?

If Tony didn’t understand this about him, something that Morse felt to be so true, down to his core, how could they ever hope to understand one another at all? 

“What is chess?” Morse asked, at last.

“It’s a game, I suppose,” Tony said. “Although some people do seem to take it rather seriously.” 

“Why do you play a game?”

“For fun. To pass the time with someone you enjoy spending time with.”

“But this Joint Computing Nexus doesn’t know that, does it? It doesn’t enjoy the game. It doesn’t know anything about chess, not really. It doesn’t know why it’s working out the problems it’s given. It doesn’t ask. It just does what it’s told. And it doesn’t think or feel or question if something is right or if it’s wrong. It’s only a bundle of wires and tubes trapped in a box, and it doesn’t even know what’s outside of it. If you want to use it to sort letters and such, fine, but you can’t rely on it to . . .”

And why should Tony be looking him so?

“Morse,” Tony said, quietly. “Are you sure it’s Jason we are talking about?”

Jason, Jason, hadn’t he _told_ him to stop calling the wretched thing by that name?

Morse looked up at the machine, then, as it stood blinking forlornly with its loss, and it _was_ almost possible to feel sorry for it, wasn’t it?

What was it that Dr. Updike had said, on that day that he and Thursday had come down to the colleges?

_“We’ve grown rather attached to the old fellow, so we decided to give him a name.”_

But what on earth had that simple, gray box done to inspire such a sense of camaraderie—even, it seemed—of affection?

For five years, he, Morse, had worked and reworked the numbers, scrambling over the skeletal sevens, doing everything that had been expected of him, everything he had been asked to do without question. And who had he ever been? When had he ever had a name? When he had started, he had been Private Morse, at least . . . and then . . .

And then he was an automaton, a shadow.

And then he had been nothing but a long silence. Nothing, nothing. . .

_“Stop calling it that!”_ Morse snapped.

Too late did he realize how loudly his voice had reverberated around the room. He had been so lost in the fog of his own thoughts that it was only when the haze cleared that he noticed how every pair of eyes on the place seemed to be trained wholly on him. 

“Morse. Is everything in order?” Mr. Bright said, coming to stand smarty before them. 

“Ah,” Tony said. “Chief Superintendent Bright. Yes. Morse and I were just having a bit of a spirited debate.”

“I see,” he said.

Morse scrubbed up the hair of the back of his nape.

“You know,” Tony said. “I had almost forgotten. My mother asked me to send along her best wishes to your wife. They were in some sort of class together, last spring. Flower arranging, I believe?”

“Ah, yes. Quite right. Quite right.”

Morse could hardly register the words that followed. Mr. Bright seemed to be mollified by Tony’s light and ingratiating manner— he always did have a weakness when it came to hobnobbing with the aristocracy— but, nevertheless, the chief superintendent’s eyes didn’t stop wavering over to him, doubtfully, taking in the rumpled shirt that he had thrown on that morning in his eagerness to leave the house, and then settling on the empty glass in his hand.

Morse found himself wishing he could evaporate on the spot. 

Joan had been right about one thing. 

Perhaps there was someone for everyone. 

Because in that horrifying moment, Morse realized that he had gotten his wish, even though it was a wish he would dearly love to take back again. 

From the look on Tony’s face, it was clear that he _did_ understand him. That he understood him better than he had _wanted_ to be understood, in fact. 

He chanced a glance at Mr. Bright, who was still regarding him with a hint of displeasure in his narrowed eyes.

But on the other count, Joan couldn’t have been more wrong. 

He _did_ have to prove himself, just as he had thought.

He had to prove himself everyday. 


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And now Joan's POV... 
> 
> .... the tale of how she went into social work, with a small Easter-egg tribute to Drusilla_951's compelling and excellent music-mystery case-fic, “Quam olim da capo.”

“What do you call that?” her father called, as soon as he came out to stand beneath the familiar brick archway leading to her parents’ front door.

Joan repressed a sigh. She had hoped she might at least have made it past the hall stand before any opening shots were fired.

But, as she’d come this far, there was nothing else for it—nothing else for it but to play along. 

She turned around and cast a glance over her shoulder, looking over her red Mini parked in the drive.

“My car,” she said, simply.

“Where’d you get that, then?”

“I bought it, Dad.”

Her father rumbled in disapproval; whether he didn’t believe she could afford the Mini, or whether he disliked this model in particular, Joan wasn’t sure.

Joan took a deep breath and steeled herself, determined to plow through the next few hours, come what may.

From the minute she pulled up into the drive, it had all felt wrong. She knew each brick, each window pane, each spray of shrubbery around the narrow house just as well as she knew the back of her own hand, but still, it seemed as if there was something different about the place, something indefinable.

Perhaps it was because it wasn’t home anymore. Not really. It was a place to visit, but no longer a place where she belonged.

Her father was watching her face cautiously; he, too, seemed changed. He looked older, wearier, more lined than she remembered, even though it had been only ten weeks since she had seen him last.

And then, as she took in the tension there in the set of his jaw, the strain across his heavy face, the oddest thought flickered through her mind.

It was almost as if he were afraid of her.

He couldn’t help but to vent some of his pent-up disappointment in her, but, at the same time, he seemed to fear that if he said too much, crossed some invisible line, she might turn and go, vanish, questionable car and all.

And so he hummed noncommittally, as if making a conscious decision to let his displeasure at the sight of the red Mini pass.

“It was good of you to come, Joanie,” he said, striking up a more conciliatory note as she walked up to join him on the steps. “Your mother’s been in a right state these past weeks. There’s been nothing that can get the smile off your mother’s face, since you rang.”

And that was just how it was going to be, just as she had known it would.

_Your mother missed you, your mother’s been upset, your mother’s been ready to beat the band since you phoned._

But as for himself, of how he felt, there would be no word, not one way or the other.

“Joanie!” her mother cried, then, hurrying down the hall right as Joan’s reflection began to shadow the glass of the half-open front door. 

Once her mother reached the pair of them, she slapped her father playfully on the arm.

“Why didn’t you tell me she was here, Fred?” she asked, in mock-reprimand.

And then she reached out to her, raising her hands to lay one warm palm on either cheek, framing her face gently between them as if it were a painting she couldn’t look at long enough.

She smiled fondly and then bundled her into the house, where Joan was immediately greeted by the savory fragrance of roast lemon chicken, undercut by the subtlest scent of cleaning wax. The house was just as tidy as it was when Great Aunt Reenie came to visit, all dusted and hoovered and polished so as to shine like a new penny.

It was confirmed, then; they felt it, too. She was less a member of the family than a guest. And much to her dismay—from the delicate smells wafting from the kitchen— it seemed as if she was even a guest of honor. 

“Smells delicious, mum. Can I help?” Joan asked.

“No, no,” her mother said. “What with you having to close up the shop today? You just have a sit down, and I’ll just be a minute.”

With that, her mother bustled off towards the kitchen, the entirety of her slender frame seeming to radiate with joy—leaving Joan to stand in the middle of the pale green hallway, alone with her father.

After an awkward pause, he turned to lead her on toward the dining room, where Sam was already seated, his elbow on the table, his head propped heavily in his hand. 

Sam grimaced at her as she came in, leaving her to wonder if what Morse had said was true. 

If she could have spoken to him alone, she might have explained.

It was impossible, it would have been impossible to stay. It would have been impossible to sit here, in this same chair in the dining room, cloistered in this same cozy spot in which she had sat for as long as she could remember.

It had been far, far past time to put away childish things. She had gotten a man _killed_ with her frivolousness, for god’s sakes. Did they not understand that? Did they not see? 

If that wasn’t a wake-up call, a sign that it was long since time to grow up, to make herself anew, she didn’t know what was.

She remembered with painful clarity the morning on which she had packed her bag and set a letter on the hearth—how she had caught sight of her face in the oblong mirror that hung against the gold and white floral wallpaper, how those cheerful sprigs of three bright daisies had seemed to mock her, how she could barely stand to look at her own reflection.

She had been a silly flirt, she had made herself ridiculous. And then, during the robbery, she had been just another damsel in distress, ever the passive observer of her own life, waiting for her father to rescue her.

When she had wanted to be a woman, when she had wanted to have the power and the fortitude to rescue herself.

Meanwhile, in a remarkable turn of events, Morse had emerged from the crisis as the epitome of grace under fire, full of calm and craft and calculation. There had been a few moments when she had seen it, the fear in those big eyes, but overall, he had acted with a sense of self-assurance that rendered him into someone she barely recognized. 

When Morse had first come into their lives, into their family, it was _she_ who had tried to help _him_ —taking him out with her friends so that he might get some practice talking to people, playing him records so he wouldn’t give off that wifty air of someone who’d been living under a rock for five years, gently pointing out when he had been a little too blunt than perhaps he might have been.

Once, long ago, Morse had woken them all in the middle of the night, writing formulas across the twisting green and blue dreamscape of a painting on his bedroom wall, overcome with confusion and distress, and now, there he was, the rock that the hostages had come to rely on, the young copper they knew instinctively was their best chance.

In the silent and indigo morning that followed, as Joan had placed her letter on the hearth, the realization hit her, like a flood of cold water: Morse had jumped ahead of her somehow, like a knight on a chessboard, moving two spaces and one, while she had been sitting like a pawn on the back row, off to the side, going nowhere. 

And in the next moment, she felt her stomach squirm.

In the next moment, she came to despise herself all the more.

If that were even possible. 

How could she think to compare herself to poor Morse? Did she envy him? Was she really so petty?

She searched through her feelings, through her heart, and nearly sighed with relief, even as she tucked the letter behind her mother’s brass candlestick. 

No. It wasn’t that she begrudged Morse the headway he had made, those tottering and then striding steps forward. Not at all. She was happy for him, truly she was.

And yet, still, it was nevertheless true—the fact that Morse had been, all of this while, moving steadily ahead made her to see all the more that, in standing still, she had been falling further and further behind. 

“Things must be going pretty well at the record shop, for you to have bought a new car,” her father observed.

The pointed statement broke Joan out of her reverie.

This was no time for introspection. The past had happened. The past was past. She couldn’t change it.

This was a time to remain in the here and now … because now, as far as her relationships with her family were concerned, she was walking into her future.

And, for the immediate time being, that would be like nothing so much as walking through a minefield.

“It’s used, Dad, for one thing,” Joan said. “But I had some money put by, and now, I’ve just gotten a raise, actually.”

“Ah. Have you?”

“Yes. The manager wanted to attract a younger crowd to the shop, and I’ve redecorated a bit, made a few displays. He really likes what I’ve done with the place.”

“What’s this manager like?”

Joan scowled.

“He’s married with three grown kids, Dad.”

Of course, her manager couldn’t think she had any talent, any flair for marketing. Of course, her small promotion had to be due to the fact that he had his eye on her.

Her father raised his eyebrows, mildly surprised at her sharpness, leading her to wonder if she hadn’t gotten it wrong, after all.

“I was only asking to ask,” he said. “Wasn't implying anything. I know you’ve got a good eye for things like that. Look at all this you've got.”

He smiled, almost shyly, and waved one broad hand in her general direction, indicating her outfit—and she realized, with one more swoop, that she _had_ dressed up a bit, as if she were a guest going to dinner at a friend’s, rather than as she might once have dressed for a quiet evening at home. 

Joan shrugged in half-apology, just as her mother came in, carrying a large porcelain serving dish. 

“Well, might as well eat while it’s hot,” she said. “I’ll just warm something through for Morse, later. I’m sure he’ll be along soon.”

Her mother sat down and plucked a roll from a plate as if to bid them to tuck in, and they all followed suit, filling their plates and eating in silence, the sound of the tinkle of silverware against her mother’s best china the only sound resounding in the close room.

Joan had expected it to be difficult, dropping back into their lives right where she had left them, right back into her accustomed spot at the dining room table, right under the same familiar bronze replica of a graceful tall-ship, complete with all the riggings, but perpetually static, affixed to the wall, sailing on and on towards nowhere. 

She had expected it to be difficult. But she hadn’t expected to feel so wrong-footed.

_I hope you’re happy Morse,_ she thought ruefully. 

And where _was_ Morse, anyway?

“Where’s Morse?” she asked.

A flare of annoyance crackled like static across her father’s darkened face, and, at once, Joan came to understand fully what was behind the odd see-saw in his mood.

He actually _was_ pleased to see her. 

He wasn’t angry with her. He had been, that much was clear, but already his anger was fading, perhaps had been fading, ever since her mother told him she had telephoned.

His anger towards her had diffused, found a new target. 

Well.

Poor Morse.

Just then, the front door creaked open, and footsteps sounded in the hall. Even though Joan had been gone for weeks, the five of them had shared the small space for so long that she still could recognize each of them—her mother, her father, Sam and Morse—from the slightest stirrings of their everyday movements alone. 

She could almost see him, Morse, just from the rustles and thumps emanating from around the corner: Morse shutting the door behind him, Morse hanging up his cheap car coat next to her father’s, Morse, with his lopping gait, walking down the hall.

As he came into the room, his eyes lit up at once when he saw that she was there, as promised, sitting dutifully in her chair, but the brightness there died away at once, as he caught sight of her father’s pointed glare.

“Mr. Bright had some words to share about you this afternoon,” her father said.

Morse looked about, uncertainly.

“What happened to the hall stand?” Morse asked.

Her father snorted. “Would have liked to have spoken to you down at the nick, but you’ve been avoiding me like the pl . . . don’t make that face, you know it’s true.”

Morse pulled himself up to his full height, clearly affronted, and Joan felt a surge of sympathy for him.

He didn’t seem to have the slightest idea just how transparent he could be. If he weren’t so shy and awkward, he could have made for a brilliant actor, Morse, what with the way the expressions rolled and billowed across his face, just like clouds across a summer sky.

“What cause does Mr. Bright have to be unhappy?” Morse asked. “I’ve been doing all that he asked.”

“He said you had a little too much to drink, down at that chess soiree, that . . .”

“I had one Scotch.”

“We’ve talked about this. A beer at lunchtime, fine. But you know how I feel about staying away from spirits on the job. You’re there to represent the city and to provide security . . .”

“ . . . that’s just it, sir. The two roles seem to conflict, don’t they? Am I supposed to . . .”

“ . . . . not to show off how smart you are. You just can’t keep a lid on it, can you? Always have to instigate some sort of fracas . . . “

 _“Fracas?”_ Morse blurted out, incredulously.

And who could blame him? Joan found she had to repress a smirk at her father’s use of the word.

“That’s not true, sir. I didn’t _instigate_ a thing. Let alone a . . . ”

“Mr. Bright said you made quite a spectacle of yourself, that you got into an argument with some big wheel, with the chair of the foundation that’s funding the research up at Lovelace. Now he’s worried you’ve made a poor showing for Cowley, that you may even have offended the man.”

Morse said nothing, only regarded her father for a long moment. Then, he took his place at his chair in the corner, looking down at the tablecloth as if especially eager to end the conversation.

“I didn’t offend him,” he said, with a quiet finality.

“Oh, you’re sure of that now?”

“Yes.”

“Not what Mr. Bright said.”

“Well, I’m sure,” Morse said. “Tell Mr. Bright not to worry.”

“I dunno, Morse. You aren’t always the best judge of . . .”

“I’m sure, alright? It’s fine.”

Her father frowned, then, apparently mollified, but nevertheless surprised at Morse’s vehemence. He regarded him thoughtfully, as if he knew he was missing some key part of the story. And most likely, he was right, there. Joan was hardly a detective inspector, but even she saw there was some detail Morse was keen not to reveal.

“What makes you so certain?” her father asked. 

Morse exhaled sharply through his mouth, releasing a long and audible swoosh of air, just as he always did when he was trying to steady himself, all the while keeping his eyes trained on the lace pattern of the tablecloth before him.

“It’s Tony.”

“What?”

“The chairman. It’s Tony.”

Sam burst out laughing, as if he thought Morse had gotten away with something, what with friends in high places and such, whereas her father’s face flushed red with impatience.

_“Tony?”_ he bellowed.

“Oh, well that is nice, isn’t it?” her mother said.

 _“Nice?_ He’s been lolling around the bar with Donn, when he’s supposed to be looking sharp.”

“I’ve hardly been _lolling about the bar,_ ” Morse protested.

“Well,” her mother said. “It sounds like it might be an excellent chance for Tony to learn a bit about Morse’s job, doesn’t it? To learn to appreciate how much responsibility he has.”

Sam, who still seemed amused by the irony that one of the men Morse had been sent to the conference to impress had turned out to be his best friend from Lonsdale, suddenly looked perplexed.

“Why would Tony care about Morse’s job?”

And then her mother shrugged.

And Joan felt as if she had been hit over the head by a two-by-four.

In that shrug, so deliberately offhand, Joan saw it, as clearly as if a book had been laid out before her. 

Her mother knew.

She knew, and she wasn’t all that opposed.

A week ago, Joan never would have believed that her mother, their sheltered and naive angel of the house, even knew that such a relationship might exist, let alone dreamed she might act as a champion for one. 

For a moment, Joan sat as though stunned, and then she cast her gaze about the small table and wondered: how was it that had she sat with these four people night after night, year after year, and still not know them?

Her father had always seemed so imposing, so sure of himself, ever the patriarch whose golden word was law, and now he seemed to be faltering, as moody as a stray cat, as he realized the control he held over his household was falling into pieces around him.

It was as if the world wasn’t quite going his way anymore, and he just didn’t know what to do about it.

She, Joan—who was supposed to remain safely locked under his roof until she was settled, married and installed in a tidy little row house, two up two down, with a pram in the hall—had made it clear she was set on something else, on pursuing some sort of a career. She didn’t know what yet, but _something._

Whereas Morse, his protégé, the young man he was training up to carry his torch, to follow in his footsteps, might very well, at any moment, veer off like a billiard ball in the opposite direction— could very well end up out at Lake Silence, living in a world and amongst a set that was utterly beyond him.

Only Sam could he begin to understand—and who knew how long that would last? Suddenly, Joan had an image of her brother a few years older, in the Army, coming home from his first assignment at a base in Germany, bringing home a German bride.

How their father would love that.

_“I didn’t go halfway across the world to put Jerry in his box, just to have my son bring home some little fraulein.”_

And now, tonight, even his beloved hall stand rule had seemed to have flown out the window.

Meanwhile, her mother seemed to have emerged from out of a sort of cloud, transforming before Joan’s eyes from a gentle and dotty housewife to someone much sharper, much more perceptive, much more of a woman of the world than Joan ever would have imagined.

And Morse. Awkward, plodding Morse, the man she could barely get two words out of when she took him down to the pub.

Who on earth would have thought he might be carrying on some sort of clandestine romance with one of “Britain’s most eligible bachelors?”

Joan almost didn’t know what to think, so bewildered was she at the irony of it all.

Her father sighed, then, as if realizing again he had let his anger get the best of him.

“Look, lad. I saw the way you looked at Jason when we were at Lovelace College. I know this computer thing’s been getting to you, but . . .”

“It hasn’t _got_ to me,” Morse said. “Anyone should be outraged. It _can’t_ do all the things they’re promising. It’s only a very sophisticated calculator—but it can’t think. It can’t sort priorities, or make inferences without being fed a _mountain_ of data, and it certainly can’t be left to make judgments about anything that could be a matter of life or death. Do you know it lost the match today? And yet they’re dreaming of setting up some such system at the nuclear power station out at Bramford in the next year or so. Do you know what’s going to come of that, if they aren't made to stop, to at least slow it down a little? ‘ _I am become death the shatterer or worlds.’”_

A silence fell upon them, then, heavy with all the poignant ache of a half-forgotten memory. Joan looked to Morse sharply, but he turned away, casting his eyes back onto his empty plate.

It was odd, having such words cast out here, right at the table.

Suddenly, she remembered the night that her father had sat with her and Sam in a quiet corner of the den and told them the truth about Morse.

And then they had never uttered a word about it again, never spoken of it.

How had they never spoken of it?

In the same way they had never spoken of the robbery, she supposed. 

In the same way they had never spoken . . . 

Well. In the same way they had never spoken about anything. 

“Morse,” her father said, his face tight, clearly uncomfortable. “You can’t tie everything back to that, lad.”

Joan swallowed.

That was just what she had said to him, yesterday afternoon at the record shop.

How could she have said such a thing?

“You just have to let it all recede in the rearview mirror,” her father said.

The words were out of Joan’s mouth before she could stop them.

“That’s an _awful_ thing to say.” 

Her father looked at her calmly, with a steely face that brooked no argument.

“That’s what I did. Coming back from the war. Worked for me.”

“But you had people to talk to about it, didn’t you?” Joan said. “A whole generation to commiserate with, who you knew would understand, who shared your experiences.”

“I never talked about it,” her father said. “Just got on with things.”

“You talk about it all the time, the war,” Joan protested.

“Of course, I don’t.”

“Yeah, Dad,” Sam said. “You sort of do.”

Her father looked slightly stunned at being outnumbered, but her concern was not for him at the moment.

“Morse,” she said. “Maybe.... Have you ever wished you had someone to talk to about it?”

She said it as delicately, as euphemistically, as she could, but still, Morse was now watching her warily, as if he was the one now traveling through a minefield. 

“I have talked to someone,” he said. 

Well, that answered that question, at least. By “someone,” she was given to understand that he meant Tony. 

“No, that’s not what I meant. I mean. A professional. Someone who could help you … you know … help you sort your feelings out. To help you step back and process it all.”

Morse sat up in his chair, his expression clouding and closing with each passing moment. 

“Are you saying . . . Are you saying there’s something _wrong_ with me?” he asked.

“No,” Joan hastened to reassure him. “Of course not. There’s nothing wrong with asking for help. Quite the opposite, really. Surely, Morse, after ....”

And what was she thinking? Even she could only refer to his past obliquely, by way of a demonstrative pronoun...

“after ... _that_ ... you must need to speak of it. To someone who might help you to make sense of it all, to come to terms with it.”

Morse and her father exchanged pointed glances, and in that moment, Joan could see it.

They were once again inspector and bagman, once again united.

United by the idea that she was utterly off her rocker.

Her father stole a glance at the sunburst clock on the wall.

“I’m sorry. There’s something I've got to go watch on the telly, for work. Morse, you should come and watch, too. I should fill you in on a few things”

“What _else_ can possibly be happening?” Morse asked, rising at once from the table and picking up his untouched plate. 

And there they were, safely back on the topic of work.

Their only topic. 

“But Morse . . .” her mother began, surely to point out that he had never had any tea.

But Morse had already gone to take his plate into the kitchen, clearly keen to get away.

Not because he was so eager to join her father, to find out what else was brewing down at the nick, she realized, but to get the hell away from her.

Sam alone kept right on eating, calmly polishing off his chicken and veg. Then he wiped his mouth and stood.

“Sorry, sis. I didn’t know you were coming by tonight. I already told Janie I’d take her to the pictures.”

“Well,” Joan replied. “Off you go, then.”

He wasn’t going to be of any help, anyway. The bulk of what had been said that night, and of what had gone unsaid, had clearly flown right over his head.

Although Joan could imagine that would not be true for much longer. Most likely, Sam would join the Army, and then he’d come back in six months or so, and Joan was sure of it: she’d sit across from him at this very table and see the same stunned expression that she must have worn at some point or another during the evening, slowly dawning across his face.

Joan rose and gathered their plates, preparing to help her mother with the dishes. 

And who would have thought it?

Who would have thought that, in her mother—the one she had actually feared facing the most, the one who she was sure would be able to get around her— she would find the only oasis of sanity in the family?

*****

“How have you been getting on? Really?” her mother asked.

“Fine, mum,” Joan said. “It’s like I said on the phone. I’ve just needed some time. Some time to . . . ”

She let the sentence drift off, then, as her mother handed her a freshly-rinsed plate. 

“Some time to process it all,” her mother said, quietly, completing it for her.

Joan frowned at her mother’s use of the phrase—the same phrase that she had used earlier in speaking to Morse. For a moment, she said nothing, only concentrated on drying the china plate with a dishtowel printed with tiny, smiling, little tea cups, a cheery little reminder of bygone, simpler days.

It wasn’t the same thing at all. Her situation was nothing like Morse’s. It _wasn’t._ It was just .... 

“It’s not always been easy, being Inspector Thursday’s daughter. He casts an awfully big shadow in this town,” she said. 

And, since she had said that much, she might as well go on. 

“No job I have is good enough, no one I might date is good enough....”

Her mother began to protest.

“It’s no good, mum. You know it’s true. I just want to be Joan. Not Miss Thursday. I just want to be myself. Only . . . .”

And here it was, the real difficulty.

“Only I don’t know who that is.”

“Mmmmm,” her mother said. 

It was a small sound, utterly without judgment, as if simply meant to let her know she was listening. And Joan took heart from that small sound—maybe they _could_ find a way to come out together on the other side of this minefield—the minefield they had constructed out of silences, really, more than anything else.

Silences, after all, are easily enough broken. 

Maybe Joan could even admit to her mother something _else_ that she had thought her family might not be too keen on.

“I’ve been taking a night class, at the free school,” Joan said. “Just trying to sort things out.”

“I’ve thought about that sometimes,” her mother said. 

Joan was so surprised that for a moment she thought she must have misheard—for a moment she thought the dripping dish might slip through her fingers and fall back into the porcelain sink.

She had expected her mother to say that night class was a waste of time.

Not to express a wish to join her. 

Her mother must have caught her expression, because then she shrugged, smiling almost apologetically. 

“With you lot grown,” she said, “I’ve been thinking of what I should do.”

It struck Joan, then, that, in a way, her mother was in the same place that she was in, only on the opposite side—not of the minefield, after all, but of the bridge. Her mother’s role in life had been handed to her early on, but as she, Sam, and Morse went off to find their places in the world, one by one, that mission would be fulfilled, leaving her mother with the same stretch of uncertainty that Joan saw unfolding out before her, with no idea how to fill it.

Joan had wanted nothing more than to be seen as her own person.

But she realized that, somehow, she had never really seen her mother as one. Not really.

Not in the way she had come to see her tonight.

It was different, it was nice, speaking with her mother, not as mother and child, but as mother and daughter.

Or maybe even .... speaking to her as friend to friend. 

It wasn’t half bad, sharing a secret. 

Which reminded her . . .

“How long have you known anyway?” Joan asked, wryly. 

“Known what?”

“Tony and Morse.”

Incredibly, her mother's face became the picture of all innocence, as if she had not the slightest idea as to what she was talking about.

Joan felt again as if she’d been clubbed by the irony of it all.

Her mother was afraid of her finding out, of what she might think.

Did her mother not know _her_ , either? 

“It’s ok, mum, I already know.”

Her mother looked at her, the fine features of her face closed, uncertain.

“How?” she asked.

Joan huffed a laugh.

“Morse’s face.”

“Oh.”

“It’s ok, mum,” Joan assured her again. “I’m not going to say anything, if that’s what’s worrying you. What? Do you think I’m going to clutch my pearls and swoon?” 

“Oh. Well. Of course not."

“So. Have you known all along, then?”

Her mother pursed her mouth and darted a quick look to the door.

“No. It was when Morse was in hospital, after he had managed to get away from Mason Gull. Tony came bursting in, and .... It was sad, really. It looked like he wanted to kiss him, he was so happy to see him there, all in one piece. But of course he just had to stand there, because I was in the room.”

Joan mulled that over. She realized then, that she had been wrong to be surprised.

Her mother might branch out, find a new place, but she was, and always would be, first and foremost, a mother.

And, as such, any stock she might place in all of the abstract rules and mores and conventions of the world paled in comparison to the happiness of her children. 

“I used to think, that you were trying to set us up, me and Tony,” Joan said, with a smirk.

“Oh, I was. What? And have my daughter a countess?” her mother laughed. “Don’t know why I didn’t see that was not really a possibility right away, really. With Tony, that is,” she added, pointedly. “With Morse, not so much.” 

“He’s so bloody awkward, I suppose he’s hard to read at all,” Joan said. 

“Ah,” her mother said. “But he knows it. He knows he is. That’s what’s so hard to watch.” 

Joan scowled then, softly to herself. 

That was precisely why Joan had ventured to suggest that perhaps Morse could use some help, _real_ help, something other than their bumbling efforts.

Morse, too, could see it, that gap, and if it made him unhappy . . . 

Suddenly, as if he knew they were speaking of him, Morse called out from the den.

_“Joan!”_

Joan and her mother exchanged curious glances, and then Joan set the dish she held on the drying rack and wiped her hands.

She went out of the kitchen, only to find Morse bounding into the hall. 

“Joan! I need to ask you something.”

“Whatever is it?”

“It’s on the television. There’s something I need to ask you, something you need to see.”

He turned on his heel and darted back across the hallway, then, leaving Joan to follow in his wake, wondering what he was on about. 

In the darkened den, her father was sitting on the sofa, smoking his pipe, the light from the telly flickering oddly across his face. 

“I’ve told you, Morse,” he said, grumpily. “It’s the Wildwood.”

And he was right: It _was_ the Wildwood on the screen, the camera moving in and out from shots of the band to close-ups of Nick Wilding, zooming in on his face as he twisted back and forth in place while half-staring up at the ceiling—looking sort of zoned out, to be honest—as he belted out the words to the band’s new song, “Jennifer Sometimes.”

But why Morse should care, Joan couldn't imagine. Not only did he hate pop music, he usually made his distaste for it clear at every available opportunity. 

But not tonight, it seemed. Tonight, Morse was standing right next to her parents’ new, large free-standing television set, hunched over, bracing his hands on his thighs, looking intently at the screen.

When the camera trained in again on Nick Wilding, Morse pointed to him. 

“But which one is this?” he asked. 

“That’s Nick Wilding,” Joan replied. 

_“Nick?”_ Morse exclaimed. “As in Nicholas?”

“I suppose so,” she said.

She knew it was from a fan magazine, but Morse need never know.

_“Oh, god_ ,” he moaned.

“What on earth is the matter?” she asked.

“He’s the one who was on the poster you were hanging, isn’t he? Yesterday afternoon?”

_“Yesterday?”_ her father exclaimed.

Joan winced. In his excitement, Morse had given himself away, but he didn’t seem much to care at the moment.

“Yes,” Joan said.

“And he was wearing this . . . this ridiculous parody of a nineteenth-century officer’s jacket. Wasn’t he?”

“It’s a stage costume, but alright,” Joan said.

Morse leaned over again, hovering before the television set as if poised for the pounce, and when Wilding’s image flashed once more across the screen, he pointed to a brooch that the pop star wore on his coat, right alongside the brass buttons running down the center of his chest, right over his heart.

“But _this_. He wasn’t wearing this, on that poster, was he?”

Joan narrowed her eyes, considering.

“No,” she said. “No, he wasn’t.”

“ _Oh, god,_ ” Morse moaned. “I didn’t want it to be her.”

“What _her?_ What are you getting at?” her father asked.

“That brooch. It’s Alix’s Eyes, sir. It’s the jewel that’s been stolen from the Ashmolean. That story. That story Alicia Collins told us of Nicholas and Alexandra. About how theirs was a love match, rather than just another arranged royal marriage, about how Tsar Nicholas gave her the jewel as a wedding gift.”

He paused and took a deep breath.

“Alicia Collins had a poster of the Wildwood, hanging in her flat. It must be that she fancies herself in love with Nick Wilding. Don't you see, sir? She’s reenacted the story. She’s Alexandra, and she’s given the brooch back to Nicholas.”

“Well good for her,” Joan said.

They both turned to look at her.

But it took some guts, didn’t it, for a girl to just come out and tell a boy she fancied him, to make a move on a pop star of all people?

“Just thought it took some nerve, is all. Nothing wrong in saying what you want, I suppose,” Joan said. 

“Oh, yes, very romantic, I’m sure,” Morse replied. “Too bad it belongs to Hermitage. Or to the esteemed people of the Soviet Union, I suppose, whichever way you want to call it. Too bad if it gets out that it’s missing, we’ll have an international incident on our hands.”

Morse leaned forward again, resting his hands on the tops of his thighs, swinging his face down to scrutinize the flickering images more closely.

“Maybe I’m . . . it’s difficult to tell in black and white. Maybe I’m wrong.”

Then he turned his head to look back up at her, his face ghostly in the light from the screen.

“Where is this being filmed, do you know?”  


“Westfield Studios, I’d imagine,” Joan said.

“It is,” her father said. “Sergeant Jakes should be down there, with Mrs. Pettybon, if you want to go down and have a closer look at the thing.”

Morse twisted his mouth, then, as if mulling that over. 

Then, he looked directly at her.

“May I borrow your car?” he asked. 

Joan hesitated. It was difficult to know what she looked forward to the least—the idea of a distraught Morse—who was used to gliding around in a Jag as big as a bloody boat—driving her car, or the prospect of being trapped here with her parents, without any means of a graceful escape, until his return.

In the meanwhile, he was awaiting her verdict with such an impatient intensity that she feared for a moment his eyes might pop. 

“Oh, all right,” she said, at last. 

He bolted at once for the front door, and Joan followed. 

“Do you know how to drive it?” she asked, as she handed over her keys at the door, and was promptly rewarded for her generosity by a look so haughty that one might believe that Morse was the tsar who _owned_ the jewel, not the DC seeking to recover it.

“It has a different feel than that big Jag, than what you’re used to, is all I’m saying,” Joan said.

“It’s fine,” Morse said. “I’ll be fine.”

But still, Joan followed him all the way out to the steps, even as he hurried down them, into a sudden cloudburst of rain.

“Be careful,” she called. “Don’t scratch it.”

And.

Dear God.

What was she saying?

She sounded like her mother.

Morse folded his lanky frame into her tiny car, cranked up the ignition, and then pulled out of the driveway, far too carelessly for her liking, speeding off down the road. Joan glared after him as if he might sense her disapproval and slow it down a bit, but it was to no avail.

Then, slowly, she turned back inside, resigned to spending the rest of the Friday evening on the sofa, watching the telly, soldered between her parents, without even Morse or Sam to act as a buffer. 

She returned to the den, where both her parents sat in the darkness, watching the telly, and took her old spot on the couch between them. 

She thought the evening could hardly get more awkward.

But she was wrong. 

Once the Wildwood’s performance was over, the host, Julian Calendar, welcomed Mrs. Joyce Pettybon to sit alongside of Nick Wilding on a large sofa, center stage, right before his desk. It seemed as if they were mirror images of one another, three people in one row, watching three others in another. 

Unsurprisingly, Mrs. Pettybon launched into her usual line of rheroric straightaway.

“There was a program on this week and it was the _dirtiest_ program I ever saw. Positively indecent!” she said. 

“Why?” Nick Wilding asked laconically, “What was wrong with it?

“Decency,” Joan’s mother said, casting the telly a dark look. “If you ask me, she just likes to hear the sound of her own voice.”

“It was about some of these so-called homosexuals,” Mrs. Pettybon said.

Nick Wilding, leaning at his ease, with one leg crossed over the other at the ankle, assumed an expression of feigned interest.

“What do you mean _so-called?”_

“What’s made it her business anyway?” her mother said, then. “As if people can help who they fall in love with.”

“Easy enough for a pop star to say,” her father countered. “But some people have to look to their careers. Some people ought to do what’s practical.”

  
Joan felt her heart sink.

Oh, blimey.

This evening was going from uncomfortable to unbearable.

Were they speaking in the abstract? Or was this all a veiled reference to … 

“Oh?” her mother said. “Do you mean like it was practical, us getting married on your two weeks’ leave, right during the war?”

But her father looked unconvinced.

“We had our heads on straight though, didn’t we? We knew what we were in for. Some people might be confused, might just be latching on to the easiest course, rather than starting new with someone else.”

And this, too, was a revelation.

Was part of her father’s objection to Anthony Donn not simply because he was a man, but because of some belief he held that Morse was simply hanging on to him as some dependable figure from his past? Someone he knew would understand him? 

Such a thought certainly shed a new light on her father.

And perhaps too much light on Morse.

Perhaps this was all far, far more than she needed to know.

Joan felt suddenly as if she was eavesdropping, as if she were infringing on Morse’s privacy even by listening to such a conversation, but she could hardly simply get up and leave the room, either.

_“Easiest course?”_ her mother protested. “Listen to this harpy! How can that be the easiest course, with so many against them? And besides,” she added, sagely, “just because some people aren’t as demonstrative as others about their feelings, doesn’t mean they don’t have them.”

Her father squirmed on his side of the couch and made a slightly nauseated face, and this time, incredibly, Joan found herself on his side.

This was all far, far more conjecture into Morse’s private life than she cared to delve into. 

She wished for nothing so much, actually, as to sink between the cushions of the brown velveteen couch and disappear.

So, she thought.

This is what it’s like to have your parents treat you as an adult.

A few months ago, her mother would not have spoken such words before her. 

A few months ago, Joan thought ruefully, even if she _had_ overheard such a conversation, she would have assumed they were speaking in the abstract. 

She put her hand to her head, already beginning to feel a headache coming on. 

A few months ago, she never would have known they were having a full-blown speculative discussion about Morse’s love life. 

Well.

Joan had learned one thing, anyway. 

It would certainly be a long time before she let her parents catch wind about anyone whom she might be dating. 

And an even longer time before she’d bring anyone home for dinner. 

As is was, all she could hope for was that the interests of world peace were being well-served by her sacrifice. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So was it obvious it was Alicia Collins? Did I mention her too much? Or was that too opaque?
> 
> I’m planning the next chapter, in which all of these threads—the gem, Matthew Laxman’s disappearance, Bramford and the Lovelace researchers and JCN, will begin to come together when tragedy strikes at the chess match (in more ways than one)—so I would love to know! I never know if I leave too many breadcrumbs or not enough.  
> Thanks for reading! :D


	8. Chapter 8

Morse sat crouched behind the wheel of Joan’s red Mini, his long legs bent at odd angles in the tiny compartment, as he slowed the car to a crawl and cursed softly under his breath.

The dark and dampened streets around the television studio were jam-packed with cars, lined bumper-to-bumper all along the curb, leaving not a place to park in sight.

He might have been better off simply throwing open the Thursdays’ front door and running all the way from Headington, really. At this rate, he might miss Wilding and the jewel altogether.

And then, glowing beneath a street lamp, as if it were showcased in a spotlight just for him, he saw it—an available space, just large enough for the Mini. He fought against the urge to hurry, forced himself to take care as he squeezed in between two hulking black sedans, not wanting to give Joan cause for another lecture.

Or to owe her money that he didn’t really have, for that matter. 

By the time Morse parked and made his way down the pavement and up to the elaborate glass front of the building, it was just as he had feared; the program was over, and the audience was already pouring out into the night, seeming to drone with one voice that resounded in the cool and rain-freshened air, humming with the buzz of excited conversation.

Morse struggled through the current of the crowds, swerving to avoid the occasional jarring elbow or shoulder, until he came at last to the entranceway, where a bald man in a tight white t-shirt stood, his heavy arms crossed purposefully before him.

“Show’s over, mate,” he said. “No admittance past eleven.”

Morse pulled his warrant card from his pocket and flashed it up so that it shone in the glare reflecting from the marquee above.

“Detective Constable Morse, Oxford City Police,” he said.

“Oh. More of you lot, is it?” the man asked. “The situation is well under control. Nothing we couldn’t handle. Didn’t need to make such a fuss of it.”

 _“Situation?”_ Morse inquired.

“Haven’t you heard?” the man asked. “There was a disturbance during filming. We escorted the agitator from the building, but then he got into a fight in the alleyway behind the studio. That other copper, Mr. Slick’s, already dealt.”

Morse raised his eyebrows, surprised.

It sounded as if—whatever had happened—Sergeant Jakes had had a busier evening than he had anticipated, when he had lamented of the dullness of his assignment, squiring about Mrs. Pettybon.

“I’m sorry,” Morse said. “But I’m here on another matter. I need to speak to Mr. Nick Wilding.”

“Eh. More pot, is it?” the man asked.

Morse responded with a dour but pointed silence. He certainly had no intention of telling the man anything approaching the truth. This was just the sort of person who would love to provide Miss Frazil—or any one of her battalion of scribbling eager beavers—with the whole tragic tale, if he had it, the very sort who would relish in the attention that would ensue.

It was still possible—if he handled the matter discreetly—that the whole business of the stolen brooch might be kept completely out of the papers.

“I’m sorry,” Morse said, stiffly. “I’m not at liberty to say.”

The man looked mulish for a moment, but then slowly relaxed his stance.

“All right, then. He’s backstage. You’ll have to wait in the lobby. I’ll tell Security to send him out.”

“Right,” Morse said, tersely. “Thanks.”

With a bristly flash of his car coat, Morse stepped smartly past the man, then, threading his way past a few stragglers and in through the opened doors. 

Once inside, however, he drew up short, stopping for a moment to blink; the walls of the airy lobby had been painted a blinding sea-green, and the white linoleum floors shone like mirrors under the preternaturally bright lights, so intensely that Morse found he needed a second for his eyes to adjust to the dazzle of it all.

That was show business, he supposed. All glitter and flash. The studios reminded him of nothing so much as an oddly ultramodern, sterile and streamlined version of Joss Bixby’s sprawling Victorian monstrosity out on Lake Silence.

Morse thrust his hands into his pockets and walked along, then, past the tall, lit placards advertising future shows and the fanciful flourishes of potted palms, until he happened upon a small waiting area situated around a corner, furnished with four low-slung and futuristic seats—looking almost more like pods than actual chairs—gathered around a small glass table.

In one of the them, a young woman sat, her eyes closed tight with concentration as she took a long drag on a cigarette. He was just about to sit down and join her when he noticed the tension in her face, the sharp vertical line creasing her brow, and hesitated; it seemed, perhaps, as if she had rather be alone.

He began to move off, to go and wait in another part of the lobby, when she opened her eyes and called after him. 

“Oh,” she said. “Hello.”

“Hello,” Morse replied.

“Mummy’s just backstage,” she explained.

Morse wasn’t quite sure what she was talking about, so he hummed noncommittally.

“Aren’t you here for her? I thought you might be taking over the other policeman’s shift. Sergeant Jakes?”

Ah. She must be this Mrs. Pettybon’s daughter, then.

“Oh,” Morse said. “No. Sorry. I’m here on another matter.”

“Oh,” she said. She took another drag on her cigarette, and then glanced worriedly over her shoulder, out into the greater lobby.

He had been right, then. Perhaps the young woman had chosen this corner seeking a private moment after the tumult of a live show, after enduring that awkward feeling of being on display—albeit at second hand—and he had intruded upon her solitude.

“Hmmmmm,” Morse said. “Well. Sorry to have bothered you. I’ll just go and wait for Security by the door.”

“Don’t go!” she cried.

Morse halted mid-step and turned back, a question forming in his mind.

Her face was round and placid, her doll’s mouth a perfect bow of red lipstick, and her chestnut hair pulled back into a bun, each strand taut with order—but yet, a definite note of desperation had rang out, much like a church bell off-key, in her voice, a strain of something achingly familiar—and it was only then that he recognized the struggle there, playing out in the large and liquid brown eyes hidden behind her bulky glasses.

“It’s just … ” she began, her voice softening. “I don’t get to speak to many people besides Mummy and Reverend Golightly.”

Morse frowned, his mouth twisting in disapproval.

There was something wrong, there. Something of the feel of . . . .

“I’m Bettina,” she said, extending her hand. “Bettina Pettybon.”

Morse stepped forward and took her offered hand. He was always a bit leery of handshakes—his right hand was often temperamental, and, even after all of these years, too forceful of a grip was enough to send shoots of pain up his fingers and into his wrist. But Bettina Pettybon’s hand seemed to fill his as softly as a tamed dove, with a warmth he had not expected; his own, lankier hand felt quite cool in contrast.

“Detective Constable Morse,” he replied.

He thought she might release his hand once their introductions were over, but instead she seemed to hold onto it for a little too long, until the warmth that grew between their clasped palms felt as if it might flood up his arm and into his face.

“There’s been some incident, I believe?” Morse asked, taking the question as a natural point on which to withdraw his hand, to step back, once again all business.

He pulled at the creases in his gray suit trousers and lowered himself down into one of the low, modern chairs with as much dignity as he could muster—but he soon found, much to his chagrin, that it was nearly impossible to sit up straight in the wretched thing.

Instead, he ended up leaning forward, resting his elbows heavily on the tops of his thighs.

If he couldn’t look professional, he supposed, at least he might look alert.

Miss Pettybon took another drag on her cigarette, exhaling a long jet of smoke.

“Yes,” she said. “A man in the studio audience created a bit of a scene, during the program.”

“What sort of a _‘scene?’_ ” Morse asked.

“He didn’t agree with Mummy. So he just stood up, right in the seats, and told her she was wrong. They escorted him out, but then there was a scuffle behind the building.”

“Ah,” Morse said, still feeling he was missing something.

“And … your mother...” he began, hesitantly, “Your mother got into a fight with him in the alley?”

Bettina Pettybon smiled at that, a smile which lit her face with a flash of hidden vigor, of a hidden beauty that seemed somehow as if it had been deliberately tampered down.

Or even .... _squelched_ down?

“No, no, no,” she said. “Some people who took exception to what he said. They ambushed him as soon as he was taken out. It’s lucky Sergeant Jakes was here, really.”

“Oh?” Morse asked. “And what was the row about?”

The young woman hesitated for a moment, then took another long drag on her cigarette, a nervous tremor in her hand. 

“About ... homosexuality. Mummy says it’s indecent. But Nick Wilding doesn’t think so. He said it was quite normal. That there’s no need to make anyone feel as if they ….” 

She said this all in a rush, even as her expressive eyes welled with sudden and unshed tears, as if her words had struck some chord of secret sorrow, and then she broke off and shook her head, stubbing out her cigarette in the ashtray before her with a surprising and unapologetic violence.

Morse felt his shoulders tense—not only in response to the young woman’s obvious distress, but also to the voice of Thursday that resounded in his head; he knew Thursday would not only disapprove of him saying one word on the subject either way, but even of him being in the same room while the topic was discussed, lest it somehow mystically give anyone any ideas.

Miss Pettybon must have misunderstood the thoughtful frown on his face, because she waved her hand about in the air around them, then, as if it was the cloud of cigarette smoke that was troubling him.

“Sorry,” she said, “I get nervous whenever Mummy makes an appearance.”

She stole another glance over her shoulder, into the lobby, as she lit up a fresh cigarette. It was as if she was afraid to be caught smoking.

And Morse felt a chill at his nape.

Because it was more than that, wasn’t it?

She wasn’t afraid of being caught out with a cigarette in her hand.

She was afraid of being caught talking to him.

Morse felt a cold surge of an old fear plummet through his veins, understood at once what it was that was so achingly familiar about that look of loneliness in her face, even though he had never before seen anything quite like it, exactly.

Although he might have done. 

He might have glimpsed her lost expression in his own face, once, had he been granted unguarded access to a mirror.

Perhaps that was the real reason why that that man had not allowed him one.

Not because he might break it and use a jagged edge of broken glass as a means of final escape, but so that he wouldn’t see it—the depths of his isolation reflected back to him in his own eyes, a look that might lead him to realize just how wrong it all was, how despite all the outward appearances—despite the uniforms and the paperwork and the official-looking pink and goldenrod forms, all printed up with the GCHQ seal—none of it made sense.

“You won’t tell?” she asked.

Morse felt slightly lightheaded, as if he was falling.

And, of course, she was not allowed to tell.

She was not allowed to say one word.

“It’s a filthy habit,” she said. “My vice.”

Morse swallowed, and the cold surge left him, rushing out like a wave drawing back to sea, as a tightening pain somewhere in his chest slowly unwound.

She was referring to the cigarettes, then.

He took a steadying breath, exhaling sharply through his mouth.

Perhaps he was being quite fanciful.

There was nothing sinister, after all, in that.

It wasn’t as if he exactly advertised to Thursday how much beer and Scotch he put away in a week, if only to spare himself the tiresome lecture.

Morse smiled then, a smile which reached his eyes with the depths of his relief, and he shook his head and put his finger to his lips, making a shushing sound, as if to show her he’d keep her secret.

“I suppose you think her a bit of a crank? Mummy?” Miss Pettybon asked.

“Oh, I don’t know much about it at all, really,” Morse replied. “I don’t know anything about pop music.”

“No?” she asked. “What sort of music do you like, then?”

He hesitated for the briefest of moments—long experience had taught him this most innocent of confessions could prompt unexpected reactions— but she was looking at him with such forthright eyes that he found he could not help but give a truthful answer.

“I prefer Wagner,” he said.

She smiled, seemingly delighted. “Really? How dramatic.”

She took yet another drag on her cigarette then, her eyes running up and down his figure as if sizing him up in light of this new information.

“Well. It’s always the quiet ones, isn’t it? There must be some hidden passion there, lurking behind those big blue eyes.”

The flush of heat that had threatened to rise up his arm as she had held onto his hand flooded up into Morse’s face, then, so much so that he was sure he must be quite pink under the garish lighting.

Was she . . .

Was she _flirting_ with him?

His thoughts went hazy for a moment with the surprise of it, even as he searched for a way to bring the conversation back down to ground.

Uncomfortable as it was, at least it proved his fears had been unfounded. She was bold enough, certainly. 

“How long have you been…” he asked, leadingly, not knowing exactly how to phrase it, not being quite sure what it was, exactly, they were doing on the program.

“Campaigning for Keep Britain Decent?” she supplied. “Mummy’s been at it for four years now.”

And Morse found he regretted turning the conversation back towards her mother, because the brightness in her eyes faded out, just as if he had placed a snuffer over the twin flames of a candelabrum, and that despairing look was back, the one that seemed to reach through the cheap fabric of his car coat, through his very skin, right though to some place inside of him . . . . all the way to a place where numbers trailed across a white wall.

He shook his head, as if to dispel the thought. He shouldn’t be thinking such things, drawing parallels that weren’t there.

He was supposed to be letting it all recede in the rear-view mirror, just as Thursday had told him. Not looking for it under a magnifying glass of his own devising.

Thursday had warned him early on against making too many connections. He and Bettina might share a certain degree of awkwardness, the television studio and Bixby’s Victorian palace might share some degree of dazzle, but beyond that, there was nothing else, really, that they held in common.

But it was difficult, wasn’t it? Because every now and then, in mixing his metaphors, in making some leap that Thursday might fault him for . . . every now and then . . . more often than not . . .

. . . He got it right, didn’t he?

“She really got into it after Daddy passed away,” Miss Pettybon was saying, pulling Morse from his reverie. “He was a wonderful man.”

Morse fought to bring his thoughts back to the matter at hand. 

“Was he?” he asked.

“Yes. I loved him, I think, more than I love her.” She looked stricken for a moment, as if she had surprised herself, as if she had not realized the words were true until she had said them.

“Is that terrible to say?” she asked.

“No,” Morse replied. “I don’t think so.”

“I think he was quite brave,” she mused.

“Your father?”

“No,” she said. “I mean . . . he might have been, if . . . .” and then she stopped short, as if she feared she might have sounded disloyal, her expression wavering, giving Morse to feel once more that there was some struggle there, roiling under the serene moon of her pale, round face.

“I meant that man tonight. Who stood up in the audience. And . . . and Nick Wilding’s brave, too, isn’t he?”

“I suppose he must be,” Morse said, wryly. “To write that sort of rubbish and go on national television.”

She gave him a chiding look.

“No. I mean, he says what he thinks. And he doesn’t care if people disagree.”

Morse snorted.

Sounded like a typical day for him down at the nick.

But try as he might to escape it, that uneasy feeling was slowly surging back through him, breathing at his nape; no matter how he might wish it would leave him, no matter how much he might wish he could wave it away like a cloud of cigarette smoke hovering in the air. 

Because he hadn’t always said what he thought, had he?

There had come a time when he had ceased asking even the simplest question.

When he had been only a shadow, an automaton.

When he hadn’t been himself at all.

When he hadn’t even endeavoured.

“Why do you say that?” he asked, cautiously. “Do you not say what you think?”

“Oh,” she said, the boldness in her face when she had teased him about Wagner utterly gone. “I’m not anybody much … It doesn’t matter what I think.”

_It doesn’t matter what you think._

_Who are you to question orders?_

_Do you think Army Intelligence cares if one private is having an off day?_

_Do you think the Soviets are sleeping?_

And of course he didn’t, and of course the mission was critical . . . but wasn’t this extreme?

But that man bowled him over at every turn, turned him all around so that he didn’t know what to think. Was security so tight he could not make a single phone call to the outside world? Was the state of the world so dire that he couldn’t be afforded more than a few consecutive hours of sleep? Yes, yes, it was.

And then he had lain on the floor cradling his right hand... and it couldn’t be, he didn’t believe it, it was all wrong. 

If only he could get to a telephone, if only he might have the chance to dial the one number that he kept hidden in his mind, in a place where it would be safe from all the others—safe from the exponents and the skeletal sevens and the march of formulas that threatened always to obliterate it— if only he could get to a telephone, he might ask.

_“Tony? It’s Pagan.”_

_“Does this sound right to you?”_

“Of course it matters what you think,” Morse said. “It’s your . . . .”

Just then, Bettina Pettybon mashed our her cigarette, as a group of people appeared on the threshold of the small space, led by a tornado of a woman dressed in shocking pink.

“Bettina? Who is this?” she asked, sharply, eyeing him as if he was some dangerous degenerate. “What have I told you about talking to strange men?”

Morse stood up. It was strange; they hadn’t been doing anything wrong, but, under the force of the woman’s strident tone and hawkish gaze, he suddenly felt incredibly wrong-footed.

“Detective Constable Morse. Oxford City Police.”

Behind her, Nick Wilding and a man with curling hair looked mildly amused, while Sergeant Jakes raised his heavy eyebrows in an expression that Morse knew all too well, so that he felt he could almost read the thought there on Jakes’ sharp face.

_“You see what I’ve been dealing with, while you’ve been loitering about at the chess match?”_

“You ought to have been helping your colleague to subdue a dangerous ruffian,” Mrs. Pettybon said, waving her hands about sharply in the air, as if to dispel the offensive cigarette smoke there, “rather than speaking to impressionable young girls and . . . and _smoking.”_

Miss Pettybon flashed him a worried look, as if she feared he might give her away.

“Are you to be relieving Sergeant Jakes? Is this the best Cowley has to offer, then?” 

“I’m sorry,” Morse said. “I believe there’s been some confusion. I’m here to see Mr. Wilding.”

He nodded to Wilding, as if to emphasize his point, relieved to see that the sapphire brooch was still there, pinned to his fanciful red jacket. Now that he saw it, he was sure it was authentic, sure it was the one.

Mrs. Pettybon changed her tune at once, huffing in approval.

“Well of course, you are. I must say high time, too. Purveying such filth. I look forward to reading of his arrest in the papers in the morning.”

“Bettina,” she called out, then, as if her daughter’s name alone was as good as a reprimand, as good as a summons.

“Looking forward to working with you again, Joy,” Nick Wilding called after her, but, as for Bettina, she said nothing more, only rose from her seat at once to follow her mother.

As she walked away, Morse couldn’t help but notice the melancholy heaviness in her step, the heaviness of her thick and coiling hair, that—if she was only allowed to let it down—might quite rival that of Rapunzel, the fairy-tale princess locked in the highest tower.

Jakes, too, turned to escort them out, but, as he was leaving, he paused to look at Morse, the question clear on his face.

Morse merely widened his eyes at him, letting him know in no uncertain terms that the reason he was here, at the studio, was nothing that he cared to discuss at the moment—and Jakes, in response, merely nodded, and pivoted to follow his charges out the door.

“Is this about that pot again? Or about that car? I thought we had an understanding about all that,” the man with the wavy hair said, as soon as Jakes was gone, in a manner rather too aggressively for Morse’s liking.

“And you are…?”

“Ralph Spender. I’m the band’s manager.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Spender. But this has nothing to do with the band. I’ll need to speak to Mr. Wilding alone.”

“Anything you have to say to Nick you can say to me.”

Beside him, Wilding sighed.

“I’m sorry,” Morse said. “But I really must insist.”

There was no way in this world that Morse would consider speaking of so delicate a matter before this so-called “manager.” Morse knew his sort all too well. He’d be first to queue up in front of Miss Frazil’s office, if he knew the full story.

Imagine all the free publicity? A girl so in love with the frontman of his pet project, that she’d steal a priceless gem entrusted to her care, ruin her career and risk diplomatic catastrophe, all simply to make an impression on him? It would be utterly irresistible.

“It’s nothing to do with the band, per se. As I said.”

Wilding looked at him, his gas-fire blue eyes bleary—as if even now, right after a live performance, he was high on something—but, also, surprisingly savvy.

“And it’s nothing you can let it get into the press, right man?” he asked.

He flicked Spender a furtive look, then, edged with something that Morse couldn’t quite identify.

“We know all about that, Ralph. Don’t we?”

Spender seemed to hesitate.

“Alright. You can go back to the dressing rooms, I suppose. It’s all cleared out.”

Wilding turned on his heel at once, as if glad to be free of the man, and Morse followed in the pop star’s wake as he led him back out into the greater sea of the overbright sea-green lobby, and then down a long and gleaming corridor lined with orderly white doors, all the way to a room at the end of the hall.

Wilding ushered him through, seeming to unwind the moment the door closed behind him, even though, to Morse’s mind, the dressing room, with its multiplication of mirrors circled by rows of brilliant round white lights, gave little cause for such a feeling.

It was oddly disembodying, seeing himself reflected and re-reflected, until he seemed not at all himself—not so much a policeman, but the image of a policeman, all brisk lines in his suit and open car coat.

Wilding ambled over to a small table, where a bottle sat in an ice bucket, surrounded by upturned glasses, and poured himself a drink of red wine.

“Never alone for two minutes,” Wilding lamented. “But that’s life, isn’t it? Never alone, always alone?”

Morse smiled stiffly. It must create an odd sort of disconnect, it must feel like an equation that wouldn’t quite balance, always to be kept so busy as to not have one moment for introspection, but, at the same time, to be made so constantly aware of one’s self.

It struck Morse then, perhaps what was at the heart of Nick Wilding’s troubled expression.

Somewhere along the line, he had ceased to be a person, and had become a product.

“Would you like some wine?” Wilding asked.

“No, thank you.”

“Well,” he said, a trace of a smile in his husky voice. “Of course not. You’re on duty, aren’t you?”

He held his glass up, as if to toast him.

“One should always be drunk,” he said.

“Mmmm,” Morse said. “Baudelaire.”

“You know Baudelaire?” Wilding asked. “Well, well. What have I here? A poetic policeman?”

Morse shrugged.

“Before I was a policeman I was…. I was at Oxford. Reading Greats.”

Morse had no idea what had led him to make such a confession; perhaps it was the same thing that had led him to tell Bettina Pettybon that he had a weakness for Wagner.

She may have had only two people in her life, whereas Wilding had thousands—but they both seemed to radiate with it, with that same brittle sort of loneliness.

“Ah,” Wilding said. “So. A bit of a rebel then? Fleeing the halls of academia for the grittier side of things, for real life as it’s lived on the streets?”

Morse snorted at that.

“Hardly,” he said.

Wilding seemed pleased with the idea just the same, and collapsed lengthwise onto a white couch in the center of the room, miraculously not spilling one drop of the dark red wine as he did so.

“I’ve got a new song, inspired by one of his poems,” Wilding said.

“Baudelaire,” he supplied, in answer to Morse’s questioning look. “But the rest of the band doesn’t like it much.”

Morse frowned. It was just like talking to Bettina. As if the man was desperate to talk to someone. Anyone at all.

And again, Morse felt it, that surge in his chest, the sense memory of a distant burst of panic.

If only he could find a telephone. If only he had someone to ask. Someone whose judgment he could trust when he felt he could no longer trust his own.

And he plotted and planned . . . because downstairs there must be a telephone, mustn’t there? How else were they getting instructions from headquarters? But he was always alone, but never alone. If only he had five minutes to be alone, to steal away without that man noticing.

_“Tony, it’s Pagan …”_

But then later, the plans turned to mere dreams, and then into nightmares—nightmares in which he always got something wrong.

He held the receiver in his hand, but he couldn’t dial the number, even though it was one he had kept so safe, one he knew not just in his mind, but by heart. His finger would skip on the dial over a skeletal seven, or he’d flip two numbers out of order.... Or he would get the number right, and Tony would come onto the line, but he couldn’t speak, he’d open his mouth but no sound would come, no words, only a choking noise.....

And he realized, that he wasn’t speaking now, when he was allowed to, when he _ought_ to be, and that Mr. Wilding was watching him, an expectant look on his face.

“Mr. Wilding, I …”

“Call me Nick.”

“Nick, I...”

“And what should I call you?”

Morse frowned.

“You can call me Constable Morse, I suppose.”

“Surely you must have a first name…You can’t be _‘Constable Morse’_ all the time,” he said, with a playful smile. “Can you?”

“I have one," Morse said. “It’s just not one that I care to use.”

Wilding threw one arm over his head and stretched so that his lanky form filled the entirety of the sofa, luxuriously as a cat, as if they had all the time in the world.

“Give me the first letter, then. And see if I can guess.”

“Mr. Wilding,” Morse began again. “I’m afraid I’m here on a matter of some urgency. You see, it’s about this brooch.”

“Oh yeah?” he asked. He reached to where it was pinned over his chest, and tilted it admiringly, so that it glowed cool blue under the glaring dressing room lights.

“Nice, isn’t it?”

“I have to ask you where you got it.”

“A girl gave it to me. When I signed her album. Classy, isn’t it? Sort of gives the jacket a snap.” 

Morse sighed. That was it, then. It must certainly be Miss Collins.

“I’m afraid the brooch wasn’t hers to give away.”

Wilding looked at him, clearly puzzled.

“It’s been stolen. From the Ashmolean. It’s part of the Romanov collection.”

Wilding whistled low and soft, as if impressed, and then he started laughing, seemingly delighted by the idea.

“It isn’t a laughing matter,” Morse said. “It’s theft.”

Wilding waved his hand, as if this were a trifling consideration at best, much as Bettina had done when she was clearing away the cigarette smoke.

“All property is theft,” he said. “It’s the girl’s gesture that counts for something. Her feelings matter more than a stone, right? She had a right to express herself. I really wish I got her name now. What is it? Do you know?”

“You may think so,” Morse said, pointedly ignoring the last few questions.

The last thing, after all, that Alicia Collins needed in her life was more of Nick Wilding.

“But the law, I’m afraid, says otherwise. Now, I’ll have to ask you. Would you be able to recognize the young woman who gave this to you? In a line-up, for example?”

Nick narrowed his eyes, the trace of the smile that always seemed to play about the corners of his mouth falling into retreat, growing thoughtful.

“No,” he said. “I doubt it. I see hundreds of these girls everyday.”

Morse rolled his eyes. This was a line of inquiry destined to go nowhere.

He could see at once that Nick Wilding was lying. He remembered her, all right. He just wasn’t about to help him. Wasn’t about to betray one of his lovelorn admirers to the pigs. 

“You know,” Wilding said, then, looking Morse up and down, much in the way Bettina had. “I can’t figure you out.”

“What’s to figure? I’m just a policeman.”

“Yeah, but you know there’s something happening here, don’t you? In the world. Everywhere. People our age, looking for answers?”

He extended one lazy finger, then, much like Michelangelo’s reclining and indolent Adam, tracing it up and down his form.

“And here you are in a suit.”

Morse straightened his coat and jacket, suddenly self-conscious under Wilding’s paradoxically watery but intense gaze.

“I’m happy in a suit.”

“Don’t you want to expand your mind?”

Morse grimaced.

There had been a time when all he did was to live in his mind. And even now, all too often, it seemed a place all too complicated, like a labyrinth filled with too many turns, a room strung with too many wires tripping and turning and tangling him when what he really longed to do was to break through, to break free.

“You read Huxley?” Wilding asked. “I want to see what’s beyond the door.”

The door, the door, there was nothing beyond the door, but there was also everything. Beyond the door was only more silence and that man, but there must also be stairs ... where were the stairs in the place? He’d careen down them and he’d find another door, and he’d burst out of it and fly into the sunlight, and the air would be heavy with lilac and fresh grass, filling his lungs, and he’d run and he’d keep running and he’d never look back. 

“There’s something else. You just gotta find the right key.”

He hadn’t tried in so long. But he could tell from the sound of they way it had last been closed that it had been left undone. And then he was gently pushing it open and slipping down the stairs and there were pain-filled screams, cries of surprise … and he shouldn’t think of it ... Thursday had said not to think of it ... and Thursday wouldn’t tell him something that was not true...

He should simply let it all recede into the rear-view mirror.

It was clear, after all what Wilding was alluding to... not a white door, not a literal door at all, but rather . . . .

Whatever the man must be flying high on, right now, to make him say such awful things. 

“Drugs,” Morse said, knowingly.

“Nothing heavy,” he protested. “Meditation. Mushrooms. Ever tried ’em?”

“Only as part of an English breakfast,” Morse said.

Nick smiled widely at the jest—as if to say fair enough, as if he appreciated Morse’s lack of judgment on the matter.

“So what do you expect to find?” Morse asked. “Beyond the door?”

“The infinite,” Wilding said.

“Infinite possibility.”

“Infinite love.”

Morse felt a lump rise in his throat, despite himself, felt himself falling, as if sinking into the psychedelic blue of Nick Wilding’s eyes. It was what he had never had, what JCN didn’t understand, infinite love, love that went beyond reason, love he didn’t feel he had to earn...

_“I just want you to get it right.”_

“We’re all just angels, who fell from grace. Every one of us.”

“There’s no guilt.”

“No shame.”

“Everyone vibrating at the same frequency.”

Wilding’s voice had faded to a whisper, and Morse stood there, as if torn between two worlds. He had tried the door, and it had opened. He found the stairs and slipped down, and that man was not there to stop him. And he had left the white room long ago . . .

. . . . but he hadn’t left it, either.

There was a loud bang then, and the door behind him burst open. Morse jumped and spun around. For one terrible moment, he expected to see that man, standing there on the threshold.

“Everything all right, then?” Spender asked.

Nick Wilding grimaced.

It was just as he had said, Wilding: he was always alone and never alone.

It was infuriating, the intrusion. Hadn’t Morse told the man this was a police matter? That he needed to speak to Wilding alone? He hadn’t even retrieved the brooch yet, and he hadn’t the slightest inclination at all to mention anything about the case in front of Spender.

But, as it turned out, he found he needn’t say anything at all. Wilding set down his glass and rose languidly from the couch, meandering over to the door, and, as he passed by Morse, he unpinned the sapphire brooch from his red jacket, picked up Morse’s hand, and pressed it gently into the center of his palm.

Then he closed Morse’s cool fingers around it and smiled, raising the back of his hand to his mouth and brushing the knuckles with his lips in a gallant little flourish.

Morse stood, utterly stunned for a moment by the ridiculous and theatrical gesture, while Spender hissed in disapproval.

“Nick,” he said, as if the word alone was as good as a reprimand, as good as a summons. 

Nick, however, seemed undeterred. “Goodbye, Constable Morse. I hope there’s _someone_ who you’ve told your real name.”

“Nick,” Spender said once more.

And then Wilding was shepherded away—just as Bettina had been before him.

Morse stood for a moment, alone in the mirrored room, lost in thought.....

And then he set off, walking alone down the empty corridor towards a backstage door. The security men must have been shutting the building down for the night, because the florescent lights had been turned off, leaving only the soft glow of emergency lights lining the hall to guide his path. But that was perfect. A low-key departure was just the thing he was wanting.

He was only twenty feet or so from the back door, when two men in expensive and well-tailored suits stepped out into the hallway, out from behind a maintenance room door, blocking his path.

Morse’s breath caught in his throat as he drew up short at the sight of them.

 _“You!”_ he gasped.

“Good evening, Detective Constable Morse,” Louis said.

“Nice seeing you again,” Singleton said.

“You’re looking well,” Louis said.

“Quite,” Singleton agreed.

Louis stroked one long finger along the line of his moustache, then, and nodded meaningfully to Morse’s closed hand.

“Ah. It looks like you found it, then.”

“Thought you would do a smash-up job with that,” Singleton said. “We had every faith in you.”

“Now,” Louis said. “If you’ll just hand that over to us, you can consider your duty discharged.”

“But ... ” Morse protested.

And then they were at it, their old game, speaking in the same sing-song pattern of Tweedledum and Tweedledee, at once so stupid and so effectual, making him to feel off-center, rather as if he was surrounded by a crowd of Special Branch agents, rather than confronted by only two slight men in posh suits with posh smiles, as if he’d been out-argued, shouted down, before he could even open his mouth to speak.

“Come now, Constable,” Louis said. “This is a matter of some international importance.”

“Far beyond what you’d expect a mere detective constable to be entrusted with.” 

“Especially one who can’t even remember to take his eggs home from the grocery shop.”

“Rather!”

Morse scowled. The shot about the eggs was a low blow. After all, they had picked him up right off the pavement, right during the first week of his freedom, with little to no explanation. No wonder he was so grateful to get the hell out of their car that he had forgotten the groceries he had been fetching for Mrs. Thursday.

“I can’t be entrusted with its care,” Morse said, scathingly.” But it was all right for me to find it, was it?”

“And you’ve done swimmingly, as we said.”

“Yes. Good show.”

“What’s going to happen to Miss Collins?” Morse asked.

“Don’t worry about that, now.”

“We want to keep it quiet, don’t we? We’ll just keep this amongst the three of us.”

“Four,” Morse corrected.

“Oh, yes, I suppose you can tell your guv’nor, of course. Case closed and all the rest,” Louis said. 

“No. I mean Nick Wilding. He knows.” Morse said. “I told him what it was.”

They laughed.

“That won’t prove a problem,” Singleton said.

“Who will ever believe him, if he did tell such a tale?” Louis added.

He pinched his thumb and forefinger together, then, and held them to his lips, as if he was taking a drag of an imaginary marijuana joint, and then blew an imaginary cloud of smoke into the air.

“And besides,” Louis continued. “He won’t want to get anyone in trouble with the swine.”

“The pigs, you mean,” Morse corrected. 

“What’s that, Constable?”

“That’s what they say. What they call us. The pigs.”

My god, they were out-of-touch, closeted in their plush headquarters, feasting on potted shrimps.

Even he knew that much.

“Oh. Well. Point is, he won’t tell a soul, either. And if he did, as we said, who would believe him?

“Only those who are drinking his lemonade.”

“So,” Louis said, extending one perfectly smooth and manicured hand. “If you will be so kind, Constable. We’ll take it from here.”

Morse could scarcely believe it. After all of it, all of the long week—reopening the five-year-old cold case that seemed to have been bungled by County, enduring the existential awfulness of the chess match, dealing once more with the infuriating Mr. Copley-Barnes, suffering through that awful visit to Ronald Beavis’ flat, soaking in the loneliness of it, the melancholy and the opera records and the dank water stains on the wallpaper and the Scotch. And now to think of what might happen to poor Miss Collins, who seemed to him guilty of nothing but a foolish excess of feeling … and it was the three billy goats gruff down at Lovelace College—Dr. Ellsworth, Dr. Updike and Dr. Maxwell—who ought to be arrested for their terrifying hubris ... especially that young Dr. Maxwell ... what a hypocrite he was, really, tweaking his machine in one moment, and running off with the Soviet researcher with the soft dimples and soft dark hair, against all reason, in the next …

“Constable? The brooch?”

Morse sighed and handed the jewel over, then, with as little good grace as possible. 

He had been on a wild goose chase, doing all of the footwork for Louis and Singleton, and yet he would get none of the credit.

Meanwhile, where had they been?

Most likely at that safe house equipped with every comfort, smoking cigars before the fire, examining their glasses of Chateau Lafite Rothschild in its light, complaining when the chicken pie wasn’t quite up to snuff.

“So. That’s it, then?” Morse cried, outraged. “I’ve got Matthew Laxman on my hands, this chess match, and to top all, you must have been having me followed, to know that I was here. You must have _seen_ how much I’ve had on my plate, and yet you’ve done nothing to help.”

“Matthew Laxman?” Singleton said. “What’s this about Matthew Laxman? That was in ’62, wasn’t it? Why, my dear Constable. That case is five years old.”

The surprise hidden in Singleton’s plummy voice gave Morse pause; perhaps he had said too much. Why should a missing persons case, long ago put to pasture by Oxford County police, resonate so with Special Branch at all? 

And yet Singleton was certainly quick enough off the mark to remember the exact year the botanist had gone missing.

“Some students at an archeological dig, found what might be his glasses,” Morse said. “We’re looking into it.”

“I say,” Louis said. “I do hope you’re not muddling your priorities, what with this chess match going on. We wouldn’t want you to neglect our Soviet friends.”

“Yes,” Singleton said. “It would be best, all in all, if you were to forget this Laxman business. Best to keep all your eggs in one basket.”

“Nicely phrased, old boy,” Louis replied.

Then he tipped an imaginary hat.

“Nice working with you, Constable Morse,” he said.

“We must do it again sometime,” Singleton agreed. “I have a feeling, in fact, that we’ll be in touch soon.” 

“Indeed,” Louis said.

They swiveled about then, with their usual crisp efficiency, and went out the back door, leaving Morse standing in the empty corridor staring after them.

“I certainly hope not,” Morse said, aloud to no one, into the echoing space, and then he, too, strode off towards the door.

Once he pushed the door open, he found that Louis and Singleton were gone; there was no trace of a car in sight, nor even the fading rumble of the sound of an engine. 

They had utterly disappeared, leaving only the street lamps shining forlornly on the glistening damp pavement behind them.

Morse heard a swishing noise then, and spun about, to find a single custodian emerging from the shadows, sweeping up the ticket stubs and cigarette butts left by the departing crowd.

Then Morse turned again to the empty street.

“I don’t believe this,” he seethed.

The custodian looked up from his task then, seemingly amused at his outburst, and winked, even as Morse tore off down the pavement, back to Joan’s Mini, now parked alone on the curb.

He had made it halfway back, when he whirled around with a swish of his car coat.

Was it his imagination, or was there something familiar in the old man’s wink, in his bemused brown eyes? Some hint of laughter, something incongruously younger, perhaps, in the wizened face?

Morse ran back down the pavement, the sound of his footfalls resounding through the clear night air.

But when he made it back to the stage door, the custodian, too, was gone, as if he had vanished in a trick of smoke and mirrors, in a swirl of magic dust.

Morse stood there for a long while, contemplating what it all might mean.

Louis and Singleton, it seemed, were back in his life again.

And also, perhaps, possibly, Joss Bixby.

Or whatever he was calling himself these days. 

But why? Was it the case of the brooch alone that had warranted this attention? Or was there something more? Something to do with Bramford? Or the chess match? Or both? 

Was there some connection, there?

He reached his hand deep into his pocket, closing his fingers over the cold metal of Joan’s car keys, as if to hold on to something solid even as the ground seemed to shift beneath him.

And then he turned, and slowly made his way back to the red Mini glowing under the light of the street lamp, the only spot of color amidst the surrounding gray of the streets and sleeping stone buildings.

And then, he was running.


	9. Chapter 9

As soon as Morse made it over the threshold, he spun around on the spot, closing the door on the vastness of the star-strewn night behind him.

For a long moment, he simply stood there, both palms resting against the smooth back of the door, breathing in the reassuring scent of damp wool and pungent tea and allowing that sense of panic that had so pursued him as he had hurtled along the damp pavement, in and out of the yellow light of the street lamps, to slowly drain out of him.

Gradually, his racing heartbeat stilled, as the fear that had followed him like a pair of ever-watching eyes faded, until he merely felt numb to it all.

What was it to him, really, if Louis and Singleton were to take the credit for solving the case? What did it matter, in the end, if they were to rob him of the accolades for the recovery of the stolen Romanov jewel? 

All’s well that ends well, after all. 

He exhaled a long and steadying breath and straightened, sliding Joan’s keys into his pocket. Then he headed down the familiar pale green hallway, stopping at the hall stand to shrug himself out of his ill-fitting car coat, hanging it on the iron hook between Joan’s lightweight, periwinkle-blue one and Mrs. Thursday’s flowery Macintosh. 

The injustice of Louis and Singleton’s swooping in on his case prickled at the edges of his pride to be sure, but that seemed a very small price to pay in exchange for being left entirely alone, to be allowed to fly out of the pull of Special Branch’s orbit.

Morse had enough to be going on with, without being charged to infiltrate a perfume factory under cover of night, or some such thing.

Already, he felt dead on his feet as it was.

He scrubbed up the hair at the back of his nape and wandered further down the hall, following the familiar rumble of the telly and the murmur of conversation into the living room, where he found Joan, wedged in between her parents on the big sofa much like a little girl—despite her long legs bent up before her—making her to look rather like Alice after she had eaten the magic mushroom, causing her to grow in height.

“So,” she said. “You’re back, then. I was beginning to think I’d have to take a kip up in my old room.”

Mrs. Thursday startled at that, as if ready to leap off from the couch at the slightest encouragement, eager to go upstairs and change the sheets on Joan’s old bed at once. But then, she seemed to catch herself, clasping her hands primly in her lap before her, concealing her enthusiasm for the idea after the fact.

“Sorry,” Morse said. “There were a few … complications.”

Thursday looked at him sharply, the question clear in his dark eyes, and Morse nodded.

Whereas Joan might lament the length of his absence, Inspector Thursday, no doubt, was wondering how he had made it home so fast.

If the brooch had been, indeed, authentic, he would have needed to take it into the nick, inform Mr. Bright and Mr. Copley-Barnes, open an investigation, set up a few inquiries …

But, as it was….

Morse had thought that his grim nod to Inspector Thursday had been a subtle one, but the brief exchange, it seemed, had not been lost on Joan.

She placed both of her hands firmly on either side of the cushion on which she sat, using the leverage to extricate herself from the crevasse in which she had fallen, squeezed in between her mother and father, and rose smartly to her feet.

“Right,” Joan said, shrewdly, “Work. Well, I’ll leave you to it. Night all.”

“Night, Joanie,” her father said. His words were spare enough, but the old fondness was there in their low grumble. Perhaps they had patched it all up, then.

Perhaps, all the awkwardness had passed over, like a cloud before the sun, and he had not even had to be here to deal, to bear witness to it all.

Perhaps everything might go back to how it was now.

Morse was standing in the center of the room, arms folded, mulling this over, when he suddenly came to realize that Joan had stepped up before him, and was holding out her hand, palm upwards.

“Keys?” she asked.

So flustered was he by her abrupt and commanding manner, that Morse put his hand to his side at once, as if to hurry to comply with her request, reaching into his coat pocket…

....but finding only air in its place.

“Sorry,” he said. “I . . . They’re in my pocket. Your keys. In the hall.”

Joan nodded and went to follow him back out to the hall stand, where she pulled her pale blue coat from off of its hook even as he fumbled in the pocket of his own, searching for her keys.

“Thanks,” Morse said, handing them over.

Joan nodded once more and then looked back over her shoulder to her mother, who had joined them in the narrow hallway.

“I’ll be by Tuesday morning, mum,” she called. “Around half ten?”

“Alright, love,” she said.

Mrs. Thursday turned to Morse, then, with the air of someone nearly bursting at the seams to share a piece of exciting news.

“Joanie and I are going to Burridge’s to pick out a new lamp for her flat Tuesday, and then she’s taking me out for lunch,” Mrs. Thursday beamed.

“Ah,” Morse said.

And then it was his turn to dart a hawkish glance to Joan, willing her to see it—from the light in her face, you would have thought that Mrs. Thursday had won an all-expenses paid trip to Paris, rather than been extended a simple invitation to join her daughter on a mundane errand.

Joan smiled ruefully in reply—she had noticed, alright—and then slipped out the door, looking sheepish, in a glimmer of pale blue.

“Well. I’m off to bed,” Mrs. Thursday announced, back to her old crisp self, once the door had closed behind her daughter. “If you and Fred make a cuppa, clean up after yourselves, mind.”

“Yes, Mrs. Thursday,” Morse said.

“Night, love.”

“Night.” 

As soon has she had begun to go up the stairs, another thought struck Morse, and he wheeled around and darted back into the living room, where Thursday was still sitting on the end of the big, russet-colored couch. Morse crossed the room in an instant, nearly sprinting to the window, flicking the lace curtain aside to look out into the darkness. 

No one was out there, were they?

No one who might follow Joan? 

“What’s the matter with you?” Thursday asked. “Joanie’s fine. She can manage. Just like I was telling Win.” 

“Nothing,” Morse said.

Thursday sighed and pulled himself out from amongst the cushions— with considerably more effort than his daughter and just done—and went to snap off the telly.

The sudden silence left the room instantly transformed, turning it from the cozy space where he had so often sat on the marshmallow of a couch with the Thursdays—watching programs that he scarcely paid attention to, but rather only let flicker across his eyes, happy enough just to be amongst them as they chatted and passed about a box of Creswell’s chocolates—to someplace vaguely unfamiliar. . . . to that strange and shadowed room in which he had once sat amidst a rustle of white paper, his left hand moving as fast as it could, leaving a trail of numbers and equations behind it.

_“I have to finish,” he said had said._

_“Lad,” Thursday sighed._

_“I told you. I have to finish.”_

_Thursday hesitated before he said the one word._

_“Why?”_

_Morse sat for a moment, stunned with the realization. He didn’t know why. He wasn’t even quite sure what he was doing there, sitting amongst a mass of white paper._

_“I don’t want to do this anymore,” he said, and his voice was a little wild. “I never had any interest in this. I was reading Greats.”_

_“I know,” Thursday said._

_“But I have to finish.”_

_“No, Morse,” Thursday said. He walked over and knelt down on the carpet across from him. Then, slowly, he began to gather the papers up._

_“You sure you wouldn’t feel better, telling me the truth of what happened while you were up at Richardson’s?” he said._

Morse flinched with the resurrection of the half-forgotten memory; it was odd that it should come to him now, so vividly—it was almost as if he could see the ghost of his former self, sitting there in the middle of Mrs. Thursday’s well-swept carpet.

And, just as he had then, two years ago, Morse realized the best course would be to tell Thursday the truth of what had happened. Even Louis and Singleton, after all, had not demanded that degree of silence from him.

Thursday eased himself down onto his overstuffed armchair by the hearth, gesturing with a jerk of his head for Morse to take up his usual spot on the couch, and then he leaned forward on his knees, with the air of one prepared to speak in low tones. 

“So. How did it go, then?” he asked, his voice reverberating with that familiar, quiet rumble. “Got back here quick enough. Was Wilding’s gem a fake?”

“No,” Morse said, sinking into the sofa, resting his hands on his knees. “It was authentic. I just ran into some old friends who took it off my hands. We’ve been relieved of the case, it seems.”

“What?”

“Special Branch was there. Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”

Thursday’s expression clouded. And it was a nuisance, to be sure—Morse had hoped never to deal with the two of them again, honestly. 

But, on the other hand, it was one less thing on Cowley’s plate.

Perhaps, if they were so keen on handling the matter discreetly, Miss Collins would be let off easy. She was deluded, surely, but to let oneself be carried away on some lovelorn fantasy was surely a forgivable offense. It wasn’t as if she had done anyone any harm.

Perhaps, if the Tsarina had been so in love, as Miss Collins had said, she wouldn’t have minded the gesture, would rather her old brooch be given once more as a token of affection, to be worn warm over a beloved’s heart, rather than to remain forever sealed under cold glass.

“I dunno,” Morse mused. “Perhaps, it’s for the best. Perhaps, if they want to keep it all on the quiet, they won’t deal with Miss Collins too harshly.”

Thursday’s face fell further.

“Always as soft spot, haven’t you? Mind you don’t get too soft.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Morse asked.

“Nothing,” Thursday said. “What I want to know is, how did they know you were there, at the studios? You didn’t even know you were going out there yourself until two minutes before you left.”

“I dunno,” Morse shrugged. “They were following me, I suspect. They’ve been following me. Just like the last time.”

A muscle in Thursday’s jaw jumped, but he said nothing, only nodded grimly.

“Right,” he said. “Right.”

“It’s alright, sir,” Morse said, perplexed by the sudden hardness of Thursday’s expression. “I was just relieved not to be ushered off into a waiting black car with them again, to be given some vague new directive. The important thing is, the jewel’s been found. It’s over.”

“Right,” he said.

Morse scowled.

He would have thought Thursday would have been happier, what with Joan home.

He had found Joan. He had found the jewel. -

What was troubling the old man now?

“Well,” Morse said, rising to his feet. “I’m knackered. I’m off to bed.”

“Right,” Thursday said, without bothering to look up at him. Instead, he kept his gaze trained straight before him, his eyes boring into the darkness, as if he were utterly preoccupied by some other question.

“Mind how you go.”

***

Morse blinked, and the world was much brighter, much clearer, than it should have been, the sun streaming liquid gold over winding vines that billowed and twisted and rose and fell, illuminating trees painted in shades of green and blue with a new poignant gleam of yellow, making them to look as if they were actually moving, fresh and alive and drifting in an autumnal breeze.

He rolled over onto his pillows, blinking heavily, as he lay in a daze, considering the way the sun fell in a slant on his muraled walls. He didn’t know why he hadn’t noticed it from the very first—but over the years he had come to realize that his painting was almost like a work of Henri Rousseau, a man who painted scenes of the jungle—wild and bold and fantastical—without ever having left France.

His own landscape was of a rather more prosaic English wood, but not exactly like an English wood, either, but rather like the dream of an English wood. The blowing grasses that moved along the lines of their brushstrokes as if in a softly breathing wind, the trees that brooded over the room like airy masses of clouds in leaf, the twist and pulse of winding vines—were all born of his imagination rather than of a crisp and observant walk. 

There were times when Morse felt he should paint his murals over, make his room look more fitting to that of a boarding DC, but on a perfect blue September morning such as this, he couldn’t think of anything else he would rather look at, really, nothing else he would rather wake to, other than this world of his own creation, the one that had lived so long inside his head and he had made real on the walls.

The dreaming, pastoral scenes were all a bit too fanciful, he knew, but the birds painted in whatever quixotic hues that he had found in the Thursdays’ shed, circling in flourishes of feathers with a trill of birdsong that he could almost hear, were full of bright notes that he had come to love, a music trembling with the gladness of being alive, of being free.

The thought of cutting off those birds mid-flight with a can of Chelsea Gray or Porcelain Blue from the ironmonger’s filled him with an inexplicable sadness, like the melancholy feel of watching a bit of dandelion fluff carried out to sea where it might never fall to rest.

And it was more than that.

Morse knew that he was awkward. That he didn’t know how to put into words what he most wanted to say.

But his painting had given him hope, that perhaps he could find a way to bridge that gap, to find a way to bring what was inside, without.

That it wasn’t too late for him.

His painting must be evidence that, even in him, there must be something . . . .

Something how lovely, how bright.....

 _Too_ bright…. 

He flew up from the pillows, grabbing at the alarm clock on his bedside table.

“It’s half nine!” he cried.

He threw the covers back and scrambled out of bed, and then he stopped short, alerted by an odd, rustling sound from somewhere about him. He looked down to see that a scrap of paper had been pinned to the lapel of his striped pajamas.

How had that gotten there?

He tore it off and held it before him, and, immediately, he recognized Inspector Thursday’s handwriting, darted out in one brief sentence:

_“I suppose you can find your own way in.”_

Morse let out a cry of protest and then tore down the stairs of the tellingly quiet house, down to the kitchen, where he found Mrs. Thursday, cleaning up the breakfast dishes.

“Where are Inspector Thursday and Sergeant Jakes?” he blurted. 

Mrs. Thursday looked up from the sink, her face veiled, as if she wanted nothing more than to keep well out of it.

“They left about an hour ago,” she said.

 _“What?_ ” Morse cried. “Why didn’t they wake me? Why didn’t they wait for me? They know I have that chess match on. It wouldn’t have taken me but fifteen minutes to get ready.”

“He said he left you a note,” she said, consolingly.

Morse struggled for words to describe just how he felt about that so-called “note,” but what was the point of it? This was none of this Mrs. Thursday’s fault.

Instead, he spun around and tore up the stairs, flying off to shower and shave.

What the hell was the old man on about now? Inspector Thursday had never done such a thing before. What was it supposed to mean?

If Inspector Thursday was irritated at Special Branch’s intrusion, why should he take it out on him? What? Was he supposed to brawl with Louis and Singleton? Demand the Cowley CID be recognized for the win?

Morse shaved in a fury, cutting himself right along the jawline.

Then he looked at himself in the mirror and sighed.

Wasn’t that just how it goes?

Now he’d look even less presentable amongst all of those researchers and diplomats up at Lovelace College.

****

Morse rubbed his eyes with this thumb and forefinger. It was only quarter past nine, but already he had a terrible headache coming on. The morning beams of light shining through the dusty Venetian blinds were still soft as they fell upon the clutter and dark green walls and dim corners of the nick, but they seemed, nevertheless, to pierce right through his brain.

Thankfully, there was nothing much in. Although, on second thought, that should hardly be surprising.

What else could possibly happen? This was Oxford, after all. Not London or Moscow or Berlin.

Just a few moments for quick check-in, and he could still make it on time to the match.

“Morse!” Fancy called. “I was looking for you.” 

Inwardly, Morse groaned.

In a moment, Fancy was standing at his elbow, hemming him in against the black metal and sharp-edged filing cabinets that stood precariously against the back wall.

“I have something I want to ask your opinion on,” Fancy said.

“I’m sorry, Fancy, but I’m in rather a hurry, and …”

And then, Fancy, smiling broadly, pulled out a small, blue velvet jeweler’s box. 

Oh, no.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

He wasn’t dreaming of proposing to Trewlove, was he?

“George, I …” Morse began.

“I got it for Shirl,” he said, his boyish face nearly breaking in half with his grin, his brown eyes shining with an exuberance such as one mostly only ever saw on an advertisement.

“What do you think?”

Fancy flipped the box open, then, and Morse sagged with relief.

It was a necklace, rather than a ring.

It was a pretty, delicate thing: a single raindrop of a sapphire on a fine gold chain. The stone wasn’t as large as the one in the brooch that Miss Collins had given to Nick Wilding, but it was more beautiful, the color purer.

It wasn’t so painful as an engagement ring, to be sure, but it still might very well be a cause for embarrassment, for awkwardness and discomfort for all involved, putting a pall on their working relationship at the nick. This was no mere token; it hadn’t come cheap, the necklace, not on a DC’s salary.

“So?” Fancy asked once more. “What do you think?”

“He thinks it’s a terrible idea,” Jakes said, tossing a pile of files onto his desk as he swept into the room.

“What?” Fancy asked, clearly taken off-guard by this unexpected salvo of negativity.

But Morse, for once, had to agree with Jakes. As short-tempered as he felt upon seeing the sergeant, who had conspired with Thursday to sabotage his morning, Morse had to allow that he had a point.

“George,” Morse said. “I think it might be time for you to admit…” He paused, searching for the right words, but finding himself unequal to the task of pinning them down.

“Admit what?” Fancy asked.

“That Trewlove is just not that interested,” Jakes supplied. “Best just to walk away at this point, with what pride you have left. Not that it’s much, mind.”

Fancy’s boyishly open face clouded a bit, closing off.

“I don’t know about that,” he said. 

Jakes snorted with derision.“Of course, you do. If she’d given you the least sign, you’d be spreading the news of it all over the nick.”

Fancy looked affronted at that, and grimaced, and there was a flash of something graver, of something older, in his face, a glimmer of a hardness that Morse never would have imagined might be found there.

Morse found himself considering him shrewdly.

A gentleman never tells, after all.

Could it be… there was something there?

And Fancy, out of deference to Trewlove, had simply made an effort to conceal it?

Jakes, however, seemed to miss the change in Fancy’s expression entirely.

“Rate you’re going,” he said, jerking his head, then, in Morse’s own direction, “Morse here will bag a bird before you do.”

Oh, and he was back on that, was he?

Dear god, but he could be a bastard.

“I just was hoping for Morse’s opinion, that’s all,” Fancy said. “If he thought it was classy enough. I didn’t want to get something garish. Not like I’ve ever picked out jewelry before.”

“Not as If Morse knows anything about buying women’s jewelry, either,” Jakes retorted.

“Well. he must have picked out a ring before,” Fancy protested. “When he was engaged.”

Inwardly, Morse sank. The last thing he wanted to bring up on a morning like this was his doomed engagement to Susan. All of those hopes from another life ... when he had been another person…

Jakes perked up at this unexpected piece of information.

“You were engaged? When? To a girl?”

Morse was about to say, “No, to a parrot.” But then, because he knew the phrase would incense Jakes more than any other, Morse turned to look at him coldly.

“When I was up,” he said haughtily.

Morse could see the calculation in Jakes’ face, reassessing him. And what was it any of his concern, anyway?

Fancy, however, looked as if this was just his point. “So you’ll know what’s nice, yeah? I’m just a farmer’s son from Devon. I don’t really know what’s in good taste.”

Morse was about to correct him, to remind him that he was only a taxi driver’s son from Lincolnshire, really. And it wasn’t as if he had made a stunning success of choosing a ring. It had been hell, actually. He hadn’t had much money, and what would be nice enough for Susan Fallon?

And what was more, what would pass muster with her mother?

Fancy, he’d have to say, had perhaps done better than he had. He, it was clear, had been thinking only of Trewlove, what her favorite stone was, what degree of simplicity or elegance she might prefer…

Whereas Morse had had only half of his mind on Susan. The other half was paralyzed with the anxiety of choosing something that would measure up to the scrutiny of her set, as she showed it off at parties to her posh friends, a circle that always left Morse to feel as if he was on the outside, looking in.

“It is. It’s very nice, actually,” Morse said.

Fancy seemed to brighten at that at once, already forgiving him his earlier shortness.

It was all that easy with Fancy.

Jakes, in the meanwhile, was looking at the young constable with guarded eyes, as if he quite envied him the ability. 

Then he turned his gaze on him. 

“What are you still doing here, anyway, Morse? Hadn’t you better hustle over to the match?” 

“I had to walk in,” Morse snapped. “As well you know. What did you expect?”

“Yeah. Well. You’ve got the old man’s knickers in a twist about something. You better get over there.”

It was too much.

He had found the jewel, hadn’t he? Through circumstance to be sure, but it had been his practiced eye that had identified it. Who else would have noticed what it really was, pinned on the flamboyant jacket of a pop star? In such a setting, it had seemed a gaudy thing, some bit of sparkle made of paste sold in a bin at Woolworth’s.

“I haven’t done _anything,”_ Morse said. “And I know all too well I’m running late. I don’t need you to tell me that.”

“So? What are you doing here, then? Move it, Constable.”

Morse turned and replaced a file into the cabinet behind him, slamming the metal drawer with a resounding clang that contained all of the protests that he couldn’t voice.

What was the point, with Jakes?

Once he got on his high horse, pulling rank, there was no reasoning with the man.

Morse cast one last disapproving look at the sergeant, rolling his eyes, before gathering up his car coat from the back of his chair and heading out of the nick, all but shaking the dust off his feet behind him. 

***

As Morse cut across the green square of a lawn that was set out before the research building of Lovelace College, he could see, even at some distance, that something was wrong: two squad cars and an ambulance had pulled up before the doors of the angular and concrete building that housed the JCN project, their red lights casting an ominous, revolving glow across the brutally rectangular windows that lined the front of the edifice. Outside, a small crowd had gathered, standing in groups of twos and threes, their heads huddled together, murmuring to one another with evident curiosity.

The flash of those emergency lights still never failed to make Morse’s heart skip a beat—they had been his first real memory of leaving that man’s house, red lights rotating above him as he was carried out into the night.

Morse twisted his mouth in dismay, and quickened his pace.

Once he drew up closer to the edge of the crowd, he began to search for an officer with whom he might inquire as to what, precisely, was happening.

The match was supposed to be his show, his responsibility, after all.

Suddenly, a familiar figure was stepping out from amidst the scattered flock of onlookers, heading over towards him with his distinctive rolling gait, dapper and well-pressed, ambling along just as if he hadn’t just been standing on the brink of some unfolding tragedy.

“Morse,” Tony called. 

Morse broke into a bit of a run, then, closing the space between them.

“Tony,” he said. “What’s happening?”

“It’s a regular circus,” Tony said. “An hour or so before the match was to begin, it was discovered that old Professor Ellsworth had gone missing.”

“What?” Morse cried.

“Yes. When he couldn’t be found in his rooms, some of the undergrads here ran a search, and one of them happened upon the professor’s walking stick on the other side of the College playing fields, right on the bank of the Cherwell. It seems as if the old fellow has drowned himself. Rather a dramatic turn for a mathematics don, I’d say.”

Morse swallowed. He hated when Tony talked like that, so cavalierly. He sounded almost as if he were quite heartless. It wasn’t the best of him, nor was it all of what Morse knew to be true of him, either.

“How do you know all this? Who said it was suicide?” Morse asked.

“A diving team came out and found the old boy at the bottom of the river, with stones in his pockets,” Tony said. “Damnedest thing.”

Morse scowled. It was all bewildering. Had Dr. Ellsworth actually committed suicide over one failure? Morse had failed again and again and again, working out the equations in that white room, trying to balance out the impossible for that man ..... surely Dr. Ellsworth at his age, had weathered many such storms before?

“I feel quite bad about it, actually,” Tony said. “I know he was disappointed about Jason’s failure yesterday, but he didn’t seem so very despondent. It’s all just an experiment, really. And as they say. If at first.” 

Tony said this with the air of someone who always, invariably, succeeded on the first try.

But still.... there was something else there…

“So you spoke to him? About the Joint Computing Nexus’ loss at the match yesterday?” Morse asked, sharply.

“Yes,” Tony said.

“And you didn’t think he seemed a man who was contemplating taking his own life?”

“No,” Tony said, airily. “I wouldn’t have thought, so. Although who knows? One never does know what lies beneath the surface, I suppose.” 

“Hmmmm….” Morse said.

Tony raised his hand to Morse’s face then, turning it appraisingly to the side.

“What the hell happened to you, anyway? Looks like you’ve shaved with a machete.”

Morse raised his hand and swatted Tony’s away. 

“Don’t,” he said.

He was on duty, for god’s sake. A man at the center of an international diplomatic affair had suddenly turned up dead, on what was meant to be his watch.

Couldn’t Tony be serious for one moment?

Tony however, seemed unperturbed.

“Well,” Tony said. “You’d better get over there. Inspector Thursday is looking for you, and he’s none too happy. Why didn’t you just come over with him?”

Why, indeed. 

Morse might well ask the same question.

“Oh. You know,” Morse said, vaguely. 

“Hmmmm,” Tony said. Then he tilted his head. “What’s wrong with your Inspector, anyway? He seems like he could do with a nice sail of the Peloponnese.”

Morse stood for a moment, baffled, his earlier annoyance with Tony evaporating, as an image of Inspector Thursday—dressed in his dark suit and standing stiffly on the deck of a white sailing ship as fanciful as a whipped confection—sent his lips twitching into a faint quirk of a smile . . . 

A smile that promptly faded as he saw Thursday, emerging from the midst of the crowds, looking ablaze with fury.

“I don’t know,” Morse said, wonderingly. .”I’d … I’d better go.”

“Yes,” Tony said. “I rather think so.” 

Morse turned away, beginning to walk in Thursday’s direction, aware of the curious eyes of those gathered before the building upon him—there were Soviet diplomats in dark suits, researchers in white lab coats, spectators in sports jackets and orange and chartreuse dresses, and even, over by a concrete pillar, Miss Frazil in her pencil skirt, her notebook in hand as if set to ambush him— his apprehension growing into righteous anger as he strode over to meet his governor, who was looking daggers at him from under the brim of his hat.

It certainly wasn’t his fault he had overslept. After the night he had, who could blame him? 

Thursday jerked his head, gesturing for him to move away with him, around to the side of the building, and Morse, wordlessly, fell into pace with him, matching him step for step as they left the crowd behind, with such obvious animus that even Miss Frazil didn’t venture to follow. They soon came to a walkway that ran underneath a horrible outcropping of the building—the architect had meant it to be terribly bold, terribly modern, no doubt—but to Morse, it looked out of balance, as if the jutting piece might crush one at a moment’s notice.

They followed the walk until they reached a little metal railing, overlooking, incongruously enough, a burbling fountain of a pond, strewn with lily pads blooming with white blossoms.

As soon as they were well and clearly alone, Thursday rounded on him. 

“So? You two done with the cozy catch-up at last, are you?” Thursday growled. “I thought you might be interested to know about our new case.”

“Tony was just the first person I saw who I recognized,” Morse protested. “He was just telling me what was happening.”

Thursday snorted.

“He involved in this investigation? First I heard. Of course, if you were here when you ought to have been, you wouldn’t have to rely on Donn to give you a briefing, would you? You’d be giving me one.”

Morse drew himself up to his full height, outraged. “I wouldn’t have been late, if you had waited for me,” Morse said.

“Yeah?” Thursday asked. “That right? Difficult isn’t it, when your fellows don’t have your back.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Means you haven’t been taking one thing I’ve said seriously. So now I have to show you.”

“Show me what?”

Thursday’s face contorted with another flash of impatience, as if Morse was being deliberately obtuse. 

“How long has Special Branch been having you followed?”

“Who knows,” Morse said, annoyed at the non-sequitur.

“Who knows? You sure you don’t mean ‘who cares?’”

Morse shrugged. Why was he wasting valuable time with this? They had a case to be getting on with. 

“Yeah?” Thursday asked, taking his lack of response for an affirmation. “That right? You sure they hadn’t ever followed you all the way to _Lake Silence?”_

Thursday laid a heavy stress on the final two words, as if he was using them to mean quite something else, and instinctively, Morse turned to where he had left Tony in the crowds.

Thursday let out a sharp noise, as if to reprimand him, as if it were somehow dangerous, even as he stood here away from the crowds, to cast a glance in Tony’s direction.

“That’s right,” Thursday said. “It’s not as if you try overmuch to make yourself popular as it is. What are you going to do when that little tidbit gets out?”

Morse started to answer, feeling rather like a fish, bobbing his mouth open and shut as he searched for the words, but apparently, it was a rhetorical question, because Thursday pressed on.

“I’ll tell you what. One of these days, you’ll be needing a favor, and no one will be there. One of these days, you’ll call for back-up and you’ll find no one’s coming out for you.”

Morse snorted. That was nonsense. He wasn’t so hopeless. He wasn’t so very alone. He had made friends.

Of a sort.

“Fancy wouldn’t do that, even if he knew,” Morse said. “Nor would Trewlove or Strange. Even Jakes wouldn’t do that.”

“No?”

“No,” Morse said.

“Mebee not,” Thursday conceded. “You going to be working at Cowley forever, are you?”

Morse looked at him, uncertainly. Was he threatening to get him sacked?

He would never…...

“Cowley will be shut down in a year or so. Merger’s coming, isn’t it?” Thursday said.

Morse said nothing. He knew about the merger all too well, having written a report for Mr. Bright about it.

Or, that is, he had “typed” a report about it...

“We’ll all be split up, most likely. Working at different nicks.”

Morse swallowed. It had all seemed just a vague scheme of sorts, hovering amorphously on the horizon. But the idea of having to work with new officers—Church or Bruce or any of those glorified thugs from Robbery....

Thursday, misunderstanding the horrified look on Morse’s face, nodded, as if satisfied his message had gotten through.

“Dr. DeBryn’s over on the other side of the playing fields, down by the river. You had better get over there, and get his report,” Thursday said. “The doctor already had to give it once. Won’t be best pleased when he finds he has to give the DC who was supposed to be in charge of this whole show his own private audience.”

Thursday swept off then, turning his broad back on Morse, leaving him to stand on the pavement alone.

***

Morse veered off, away from the concrete and glass building and its surrounding gardens of orderly autumnal pansies that could not begin to soften its edges, and started off across the playing fields of Lovelace College.

He cut straight across the well-manicured green, off towards the bank of the river that lay shimmering in the distance, taking long strides, his car coat whipping around his knees as he dug his hands into his pockets and mulled over the case before him.

_Was_ this a simple case of suicide? It seemed as if Dr. Ellsworth’s death was already being termed so, but Tony didn’t seem to think that assessment quite fit.

And he did have an awfully good sense of people, Tony.

Far better than he himself did, anyway. 

Who had been the last to speak to Dr. Ellsworth? Who had been the last to see him? Had he confided in anyone about how he had felt about yesterday's failure?

How had he planned to proceed with the project in light of it? And had those plans chafed with anyone, ruffled anyone’s feathers?

Who had found the body?

It wasn’t long before Morse had reached the Cherwell; soon, he was lopping along the shore of the gently moving river, making his way under a wavering of sweet-smelling maple trees and tender tendrils of willow that trembled in the wind, diffusing a subtle green light. It was a beautiful, perfect autumn day—the sky that brilliant and crisp and cool blue of September, and the air fresh with promise.

The world around him was as bright as to rival the fantastical scenes on his bedroom wall—but, in the next moment, all thoughts of it were eclipsed, as Dr. DrBryn came into view, standing between the bank of the river and a spreading horse chestnut tree, the sun glinting off his spectacles, just as it had off of the spectacles of Matthew Laxman, the ones that Morse had found in the archeologist’s pit. 

Laxman, who had disappeared in the vicinity of the Bramford power plant.

The same plant for which a new operational system was being currently being developed, by Dr. Ellsworth and his team.

Could there be a connection?

Although, it was true, their deaths had occurred five years apart . . . .

Morse turned his head to gaze out over the water as he walked along, watching it as it leisurely flowed on, forwards and still ever forwards, shimmering under the sun, while the leaves above him stirred in the soft breeze in rustling circles, much like his circling thoughts. 

And the world turned over, and, suddenly, the walk along the tree-lined shore reminded him inexplicably of his walk through the woods to Mrs. Chattox’s cottage, where large trees had toppled, branches bent like a maze of skeletal sevens, blocking his path. He had stepped over fallen trunks and finally up the cottage’s ramshackle steps, where silver wind chimes sounded in circles, circles like the spider’s web macramé hangings in Mrs. Chattox’s window, before which she had sat, laying out a hand of Tarot cards, the suits of which, she had said, represented the four elements: fire and air and water and earth. 

Earth, rich and deep, like the exposed pit in which Morse had found Laxman’s glasses—glasses that had been buried, no doubt, in order to hide an artifact that might identify the missing botanist’s body. 

Glasses that had been buried, just as Laxman himself had, most likely—somewhere unknown, in either a shallow, hidden grave or deep within the earth...

Whereas Dr. Ellsworth had been found at the bottom of the river ... 

Earth and water ... just like the pentacles and cups of Mrs. Chattox’s Tarot cards.

Morse passed a hand over his face; he was just stumbling around, but, nevertheless, he could almost hear Thursday’s voice, thundering against any such ideas, even all the way out here on the bank of the Cherwell, where the only sound was the whisper of leaves and the ripple of water. 

But Thursday wasn’t always right.

He could be awfully quick to discount things.

Bank robberies, car thieves—for that, there was no-one better.

But if was something that demanded a bit of intellect or finesse.....

Well. 

It was not by accident that Louis and Singleton should spend their time harassing him, rather than Inspector Thursday. 

Even now, Thursday hadn’t had it right. He had intimated that Dr. DeBryn would most certainly be annoyed with him, but, as the doctor looked up from his notes to greet him, his expression was quite mild, the round face behind the neat glasses as impassive as ever.

“So. We meet again, Nayland Smith.”

Morse smiled wanly, accustomed to the doctor’s familiar banter. 

“Doctor.”

Dr. DeBryn looked about, then, taking in the bucolic scene around them.

“Funny,” he said. “I was just out here a month or so ago, for a spot of fishing.”

“Hmmmm,” Morse said.

He understood exactly what DeBryn meant.

Odd, it was, how a place could seem so different, under different circumstances, under a different light.

He could almost imagine how Dr. DeBryn must have felt: the river, drifting onwards, reflecting the sky in the elusive color of water, the draping willows wistfully green: it must all be just as he had remembered it, on the day that he had stood here, casting his line.

Only now, in the thick grass, lay the body of a man, dressed in a dark suit.

In life, Dr. Ellsworth had loomed large, tall and forbidding with his full white beard and sharp eyes, striking a commanding presence. But now, in death, he seemed shrunken, somehow, as he lay limp and lifeless at their feet. 

Morse’s stomach dropped at the sight of the body, leaving him with that old familiar hollowness at his core. Dr. Ellsworth looked like he might have simply been sleeping, just as the first body he had come upon, many years ago.

He shook his head, as if to dispel the thought, and looked away, keen to avoid the very sight of it.

And, as he did so, his eyes fell upon Dr. Ellsworth’s silver walking stick, lying shining in the sun, left on the grass of the shore, just as Tony had said.

“Why do you suppose his walking stick’s there?” Morse asked. “Might it have been used as a weapon?”

DeBryn turned to follow Morse’s gaze.

“Cast it aside, before he went in?” DeBryn mused. “Automatic gesture, often, with suicides. It isn’t as if he imagined he would be taking it with him. He’s English, I understand, not ancient Egyptian.”

Morse looked up, sharply.

“Stones in his pockets,” the doctor supplied, appearing to read the expression on Morse’s face.

“Suicide, then,” Morse said, flatly. 

“Most likely,” DeBryn confirmed. “Furthers and betters once I’ve had a rummage.”

“I don’t suppose there’s a note?” Morse asked.

“Oh, he’ll have had his reasons, I expect,” DeBryn said. “Love’s very popular. The want of it. A broken heart.”

Morse scowled. 

“He’s a bit old for that, surely. To die of a broken heart?”

He had thought that the doctor must be joking, that this must certainly be one more example of his typical brand of gallows humor, but when DeBryn looked at him, it was with a surprising earnestness.

“Oh, we’re never too old for that, Morse. The hair of the head might grow hoary, but the heart soldiers on.”

Morse frowned and tugged on his ear.

It was just what he had been thinking that morning, when he had lain against the pillows, looking over his painting in the slant of the autumnal sun.

It wasn’t too late.

Perhaps it was never too late.

“Where do you stand with all that?” Morse asked.

The doctor blinked behind his glasses, surprised. “Suicide?” 

“No,” Morse said.

He wavered a moment, shifting his weight on the spot, before dropping the single word, the word that was a world onto itself.

“Love.” 

“Bit early in the day for metaphysics, isn’t it?” DeBryn quipped.

But then, as if he could tell that Morse considered this no answer, the doctor’s face grew solemn once more.  


_“And one was fond of me, and all are slain,”_ he replied.

“Love and fishing. Sooner or later, it all comes down to the same thing. The one that got away.”

DeBryn held his gaze with a quiet somberness as Morse felt the words distill within him, fall deep into his mind.

He stood there for a long while, the breeze fluttering his hair, uncertain as to what to say.

He should be asking more about the body, about the walking stick, pressing DeBryn further, questioning whether Dr. Ellsworth’s death really was, as it appeared to be, a suicide.

But at the moment, he didn’t care much about the case. Or his career, even. Couldn’t have said for the life of him why it had all seemed so important, just moments before. 

At the moment, all he could think of were the doctor’s final five words.

And suddenly the world turned over, and he thought inexplicably of Susan, and of her self-assured smile as they had stood in a hall full of guests at her parents’ house, all raising a glass of champagne in a toast at their engagement party, and of Tony, who moments before had spoken of something fantastical—of stolid Inspector Thursday, grim under the shadow of his hat, gliding along on a sailing ship that drifted like a cloud across an azure sea— had chatted away with a smile bright and curious, even as Morse had felt as though he were on the brink of approaching disaster.

But it was not Susan who had gotten away, although, gotten away she had.

Nor even Tony, who—owing to the differing circumstances of their lives—always seemed to be on the brink of slipping just out of his reach.

Perhaps the one that got away, was not Susan or Tony.

But none other than his own wary and uncertain heart.


	10. Chapter 10

“ _You are going on a journey. Death waits at the end. Or love. Which one depends on you,”_ Mrs. Chattox had said.

Morse strode through the high grass along the Cherwell, looking out over the river as the water streamed on within its banks, gliding forwards and ever forwards, catching the light like a billowing silver-blue sheet, hung out in the sun.

_“It’s adaptive, water is_ ,” the old woman had said. _“Fluid. The suit of cups represents your emotional connections, your relationships, and above all . . . love.”_

Morse snorted quietly, under his breath.

And tomorrow, he’d be meeting a dark handsome stranger, from across the sea.

It had all been absolute nonsense, of course.

But yet … the old woman had pronounced that final word with such an air of solemnity, that—despite her worn and gravelly voice—the single syllable had fallen upon the fantastically-embroidered tablecloth between them as softly as the tender brush of a bird’s wing.

_Love._

That was it, wasn’t it?

That was the thing that JCN knew nothing about.

And, perhaps, he had thought, the thing that he knew nothing about, either. 

Up above, fey tendrils of green willow circled like wind chimes in the liquid golden light, capturing all the mellow softness of the coming autumn, but Morse set of his jaw firm, steeled his resolve, as he turned away from the water and walked back across the green playing fields, pushing Mrs. Chattox’s words from his mind.

He nodded curtly to the grim-faced coroner’s men who passed him on their on their way to collect Dr. Ellsworth’s body—one that had been imposing in life, but which now lay in the grass at the edge of the river like a limp and sodden thing.

_Not a friend, not a friend greet_

_My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown._

_A thousand thousand sighs to save, lay me O where_

_Sad true lover never find my grave, to weep there!_

Morse shook his head to dispel the thought.

Dr. DeBryn was surely having one on him, with his talk of love and fishing.

It was better, far better, to forget the doctor’s words along with Mrs. Chattox’s. To concentrate on more probable causes for the old professor’s death.

He walked on, and soon he was back within the shadow of the Lovelace College research building. It was an ugly enough box as it was, without the addition of the otherworldly and devilish glow cast by the lights of the waiting ambulance, revolving with blazing red flashes over all of the concrete and glass. 

He went around to the side of the building, avoiding the curious crowds that had gathered out front, and pulled open one the heavy glass doors, allowing it to swing shut behind him. Then, he followed the same cold and echoing linoleum corridors along which Dr. Ellsworth had led them just a few days before, until he heard the sound of voices coming from the lab.

As soon as he stepped into the lab, however, he caught himself, drawing up short, thinking for a moment that he must have gotten the wrong room.

It was surprising how empty the offices looked—a cavern of modern blonde wood dotted with spartan desks and black leather chairs —without JCN there, against the long back wall. The computing system had been taken out onto the stage of the main hall for the tournament—wheeled down in bits and pieces, no doubt, on rolling metal carts—and the lab looked strangely desolate without it and all of its whirling and spinning tapes and blinking green lights.

Dr. Scott Updike and Dr. Thomas Maxwell also looked oddly bereft without JCN there, like two mad scientists standing over a table without a body—and even more so standing only two alone, without their senior fellow, Dr. Ellsworth, who, in retrospect, had presided over the lab like an old lion, what with his mane of a white beard and thick white hair, or like an old king, reigning over the dials and controls, gesturing commandingly with his silver-globed walking stick.

Standing opposite, Thursday was regarding the two men, his face impassive as he took the measure of them.

“We had hoped he just had just lost track of the time,” Dr. Maxwell was saying, running his hand through his sloppy, pop-star hair.

“Had anything been troubling him?” Thursday asked.

“Well,” replied Dr. Updike, musingly. “He was under enormous pressure with work, of course.”

And then his dark eyes narrowed.

“You think he killed himself,” he said.

Thursday said nothing, but Updike took his silence for as good as a confirmation.

“No,” he breathed. “No. I won’t believe it. Not Henry.”

“What?” Maxwell asked, bewildered.

“What about money worries?” Thursday asked.

Updike shook his head.

“If he got into pecuniary difficulties, it’s certainly not anything he shared with us.”

“Personal?”

“He had no personal life,” Updike said simply. “He lived for his work.”

Morse screwed up his face in a frown, folded his arms before him. 

That was hardly surprising.

Such was usually the case with these types.

At any rate, the statement certainly ran counter to Dr. DeBryn’s sentimental musings.

_Love is very popular. The want of it. A broken heart._

“How did he react to the computing network’s loss at the match yesterday?” Morse asked. “Ellsworth?”

“He was disappointed, of course,” Dr. Updike said. “But after the match we went over all the data, identified a few possible problems, and made the necessary adjustments. He didn’t see the failure as insurmountable, if that’s what you mean. He saw it as a set-back, only. Certainly not a cause for despair.”

“And what about the partnership with the power plant at Bramford?” Morse asked.

“Bramford?” Updike verified.

“Mmmmmm.”

“He thought it should be tabled for a while. That JCN needed further testing.”

“Really?” Morse asked, surprised.

“Of course,” Maxwell said, seeming to have found his voice again. “A chess match is simply a game. Setting up a system to run operations at a nuclear power plant is something else altogether, isn’t it?

“And had he discussed that with anyone else? Did he inform the director of the plant of that?”

“I don’t …” Maxwell began, uncertainly, looking towards Updike.

“I don’t know,” Updike said, “I don’t know if he had had the chance yet."

Updike brushed a hand across his trim, dark beard, his chiseled face contorting into a contemplative scowl, as if he wasn’t quite certain where Morse was going with this particular line of inquiry.

And then, Morse changed tack again, so as to keep it that way.

“You were all in accord, at the time of his death? No squabbling amongst you? No problems in the office?”

At this, the mood of the room shifted, grew more insular. Updike’s dark eyes flickered towards Maxwell, and the junior fellow immediately pushed his slipping glasses up the bridge of his nose, a typical nervous gesture Morse had seen many times before.

Then Maxwell sighed, conceding, his shoulders slumping like a schoolboy’s.

“He was angry that I left for a bit during the last match,” he admitted. “We had a row about it. The whole floor would have heard it.”

“Is this when you slipped out with the young Soviet woman?” Morse asked.

Dr. Maxwell startled at that and, for once, looked him directly in the face, his eyes wide behind the thick glasses.

“Yulia has nothing to do with this. I .. Please.”

“Her name really is Yulia?” Morse asked.

He had thought that Tony’s literary appellation had been merely been one of his little jokes, but then, again, he supposed Tony might have met with all of the visiting researchers, as chairman of the foundation funding the …..

And then, Morse’s own eyes widened as the realization struck him…

Wouldn’t they also have to…

Question Tony?

“Yulia Vaganova,” Maxwell replied. “She’s a professor at Lomonosov University. But please. Don’t … she had nothing to do with it. You’ll only get her into trouble. We were talking. Just _talking._ That can’t be against the law, can it? I’ve just... I’ve never met a woman like her before, or anyone, really, so interested in uniform convergence.”

Updike rolled his eyes and then looked to Morse as if begging for someone to commiserate with, as if he felt his younger colleague hopeless beyond words.

Morse grimaced.

The young man’s demeanor seemed far too earnest, too flustered, for there to be any sort of malice there…. 

Most likely, there was nothing sinister behind Maxwell and the Soviet researcher’s temporary disappearance —or behind the subsequent row with Ellsworth at all.

Most likely, they truly only were, just as Tony had said, Romeo and Juliet.

Or, more aptly, Pyramus and Thisbe, two lovers talking to one another through a chink in a wall. In this case, an iron one.

Morse looked to Thursday, but before he could read his thoughts on the case in his expression, a third man, dressed in a dark grey suit, entered the lab, a man who seemed to be composed of all edges—sharp jaw, sharp, narrowed eyes set deep under a high forehead, and sharp horned-rimmed glasses.

“Word has just come in,” the man said, tersely, to Updike and Maxwell. “Dr. Ellsworth, it seems, suffered a heart attack this morning.”

“What’s this?” Thursday asked. 

“But Dr. DeBryn hasn’t even begun the .... ” Morse protested.

But the man went on, addressing the two researchers only. It was uncanny; it was almost as if he and Thursday were not in the room at all, almost as if they didn’t exist.

“He was out for his customary walk along the river when he suffered the attack, lost his walking stick, and, unfortunately, toppled into the water and drowned. There was nothing anyone could do. A tragic accident.”

Dr. Maxwell looked troubled.

“But Henry didn’t need …” he began.

“The match will go on. As will the scheduled reception on Saturday,” the man said.

Morse had not the slightest idea who the man was—had never so much as laid eyes on him before—and, from the glower on Thursday’s face, neither had he.

“Who the hell are you?” Thursday growled.

“Now, Gentlemen,” the man said. “The match begins in twenty minutes.” 

“But,” Dr. Updike protested. “Surely, out of respect for our colleague…”

“Dr. Updike. The eyes of the scientific community are on us,” the man said. “Particularly Russia. We can’t allow one incident to derail the entire affair.”

“One _incident?”_ Dr. Updike cried.

“The audience is waiting, Professor. We wouldn’t want one of the nation’s top research institutions to be seen as a haven of bumbling amateurs, now, would we? Such a poor showing certainly won’t help your cause when the time comes to renew all of those helpful government grants.”

The two researchers looked at one another; Updike’s face was stony, resigned, Maxwell’s befuddled. Morse felt as though he was watching the passing of the torch, as Dr. Updike—now clearly in charge of the JCN project—nodded towards Maxwell, as if in grim concession. As he filed out the door, he glared at the newcomer in silent reprimand, as Maxwell followed after, taking one last wondering look at the lot of them before scuttling out into the corridor. 

Once the researchers had gone, the man rounded on them, acknowledging their presence at last.

“Inspector Thursday. Constable Morse, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Who are you?” Thursday asked. “What’s your business here?”

“Dempsey,” the man answered shortly. “Defense of the realm is my bailiwick. National interest. Pax Britannica.”

Morse shifted his weight, feeling uneasy. This Dempsey seemed to employ the same chanting sort of condescending tone as Louis and Singleton, only edged with a trace of silk and danger, an unsettling combination that left him feeling almost nostalgic for Tweedledum and Tweedledee, as if they were old friends.

“What are you, Special Branch?” Thursday asked.

“Morse or less,” the man said, with a smirk. “Yes, why not?”

The flippancy didn’t go over well with Thursday.

“Get bloody cute and I’ll run you in,” he snarled.

The man smirked again, supremely unconcerned. Then he sauntered over to a phone on one of the desks and picked up the heavy black receiver, extending it as if in offering. 

“Home office, extension 255. Have the duty man put you through to Colonel Doleman. He’ll vouch for my bona fides.”

Thursday seemed to draw back at that, considering.

“Now, surely, you must have other investigations in need of your attention, Inspector. Must be a car theft or two in, at Cowley, mustn’t there?” Dempsey asked.

And then he nodded, wryly, to Morse.

“Constable. I must say I’m surprised to find you loitering here. I believe you are supposed to be on duty. Making certain all goes smoothly at the match?”

Morse spun around to Thursday. He could scarcely believe it. Twice in as many days, he was being submarined? Were they really going to accept this?

But Thursday's expression was stormy under the brim of his hat, his darkened eyes brooking no argument, and he gestured with a jerk of his head to the door.

Morse followed the Inspector out into the corridor, but Thursday didn’t lead him back into the hall for the match. Instead, he turned left, veering down a back hallway that went along behind the stage area, heading towards one of the sets of glass doors that led out to other side of the building, out to where the lily pond lay.

Morse kept pace with him step for step, until they came at last to a stop at the edge of the low, concrete wall that overlooked the glassy water drifting with white blossoms.

“I don’t suppose that was your Tweedledum or Tweedledee, was it?” Thursday asked. 

“No,” Morse conceded. “It wasn’t.”

Which brought up an entirely different question.

Why weren’t the two agents already known to him sent out?

Why send out a third? Why risk unveiling another agent’s identity?

Was there some dissension there?

“What was all that about the power plant?” Thursday asked. “Where were you going with that line of inquiry?”

Morse frowned.

Wasn’t it obvious?

“We’ve got two victims, both of whom had ties to the Bramford Power Station,” he said. “Laxman disappeared in the vicinity, and now we have Ellsworth, who was working on a system for it.”

“Two deaths five years apart, you mean,” Thursday corrected. “Without definitive proof that either was murder.”

Morse folded his arms, looking up into Thursday’s shadowed face.

“You _can’t_ tell me that you believe Dr. Ellsworth died of a ‘heart attack?’ A cause that seems to have been decided upon before Dr. DeBryn has even got his body down to the mortuary? And now probably never will? What do you wager that DeBryn’s about to receive a similar visit?”

Thursday narrowed his eyes, considering.

“You’ve got Laxman. A botanist making a study of plants in Bramford Mere,” Thursday said. “And Ellsworth. A computer researcher developing a system to assist in power plant operations …. They’d be on opposite sides of the fence, wouldn’t they? On opposite teams, so to speak? What’s your motive?”

“That’s just it,” Morse replied. “When I was in Bramford, no one seemed all that keen on Laxman. Evidently, he was short with the ladies in the market, condescending to all whom he met. I spoke to an old woman there, a Mrs. Chattox, and she appeared to believe that Laxman’s claim to be a botanist was only a cover, that he was _actually_ a surveyor, working for the plant.” 

“So… someone from Bramford might have had just as much cause to resent Laxman as someone from the plant, you think?” Thursday asked. “The first, believing he was a surveyor, traipsing across the land, the second, not taking a shining to a botanist sticking his beak in, researching how gamma rays are causing the woodspurge to turn orange? That what you mean?”

“Laxman certainly didn’t go out of his way to make himself popular, no,” Morse said.

“Sounds like someone else I know,” Thursday grumbled, and Morse ignored the jibe.

“Say someone from Bramford _did_ kill Laxman, in the belief that he was a surveyor. The Joint Computing Nexus’ failure at the match yesterday might have pushed the _same_ person over the edge, someone out there fearful that an imperfect system might be put into use at a plant just bordering their land. A system they have no faith in.”

“But Maxwell and Updike said he was pulling the plug on that.”

“But they wouldn’t have known that, would they?”

Thursday frowned. “Sounds like you’re pulling out a lot of “what-ifs” to connect two unconnected deaths.”

Morse took a deep breath. He knew all too well, how it might sound, but... 

“When I was at Mrs. Chattox’s house, she gave me a Tarot card reading.”

Thursday raised his eyebrows, surprised, but Morse shook his head dismissively.

“The whole town is besotted with it. Pagan rites, Morris dancers … all of it. But … what I’m getting to is… she made it a point to tell me about how the suits of the cards correspond to the four elements: earth, water, air, fire.”

“And?”

“And … we found Laxman’s glasses at an archeological dig, didn’t we? Someone had buried them. Most likely his body is out there somewhere, buried as well. And now Dr. Ellsworth has been drowned. Earth and water.”

Thursday made an incredulous face, and little wonder: there were any number of possibilities.

Morse tugged fretfully at his ear, and then continued on.

_“Or,”_ he mused, “It could be just the opposite. These deaths _could_ be the work of someone at the plant. County never so much as questioned anyone there about Laxman. If someone up at the plant knew that Ellsworth wanted to delay the implementation of the new system ... it _could_ be that the same person who wanted Laxman, an interfering botanist, out of the way, did for Ellsworth, to keep him from impeding progress.”

“Perhaps,” Morse concluded, with an air of triumph. “Perhaps someone from the plant _chose_ this pattern to make it _look_ like someone from Bramford, to defray suspicion.”

“Two cases are hardly a pattern, Morse,” Thursday said. “And besides, it needn’t be a matched set, if there were misunderstandings all round. It could be someone from the town did for Laxman and someone from the plant did for Ellsworth. Or the other way ‘round.”

“Mmmmm,” Morse said.

“Or it could be Laxman had an accident. Or that Ellsworth committed suicide. Dr. DeBryn said he had stones in his pockets. Maybe the powers that be just don’t want that fact known. Maybe it doesn’t do to have it spread around that one of the nation’s top researchers despaired so over his project. Hardly does for morale.”

“Mmmmm,” Morse said.

“Or it could be that the cow jumped over the moon.”

Morse scowled, pulled out of his reverie by the ludicrousness of Thursday's final words.

“What are you saying?” Morse asked.

“I’m saying don’t go making something out of nothing.”

“Well.... That’s what we _do,_ isn’t it?”

“That’s what _you_ do.”

“So. Are we going to walk away then?”

“Walked away from Tweedledum and Tweedledee, didn’t you?”

“That was over a brooch. This is a question of murder. A matter where lives might be at stake. You can’t let that go.”

Thursday stepped back, rubbed one broad and well-worn hand across his face, as if he were deliberating something.

“We’re not letting it go,” he said. “It’s Special Branch’s bailiwick. Like the man said.”

“And you trust them?”

“Not for me to decide, is it? We’re meat and two veg coppers. Seems to me you’re well out of it. You’ve got a conflict of interest here, don’t you?”

“Don’t look like that,” he rumbled, then, even though Morse hadn’t thought he had changed his expression in the slightest. “You know who I mean. Tony. Chairman of the foundation. Seems like he might have an interest in all of this.”

“Tony doesn’t have anything to do with this,” Morse said, waving his hand. “His foundation’s largely philanthropic. It’s just a game to him.”

“Still. Don’t need the likes of our friend Dempsey looking into Tony’s activities too much, do you? You think Tweedledum and Tweedledee wear on your nerves? What will you do when someone like that’s got something on you? Any little side mission Special Branch has got, that they don’t want to dirty their hands with? There you go. You’re their man.” 

“Blackmail,” Morse said.

Thursday said nothing.

“They wouldn’t,” Morse said.

“Wouldn’t they?” Thursday said darkly.

Morse leaned heavily against the wall, casting his gaze down to where the lilies floated on the surface of the water with a buoyancy and lightness that seemed contrary, out of place, in this world of concrete and glass. Suddenly, all of ideas and theories and counter-theories that had poured so freely from his mouth seemed to fall like wafting leaves to the surface of the water, all of his words draining away, down into its depths. 

An odd expression passed over Thursday’s face, then, a mixture of satisfaction and regret.

He shrugged his broad shoulders, and his stormy expression cleared, as if he didn’t have the heart to hit a man when he was down.

“Better get on in to the match,” he said. “Before you’re missed.”

And this time, he knew Thursday was not discounting him.

Just telling him like it was.

Thursday turned to go, and Morse was glad, for once, that the Inspector was leaving it at that.

That man, Dempsey, was still about the premises, after all—perhaps might even be watching out of one of the many immense windows. It would not do for him to see them huddled here together, in close conference.

Morse always resented it, being underestimated.

But, he had to admit, sometimes it made the job easier, when your opponent didn’t see you coming.

****

Morse stood against the far wall of the Lovelace College hall, his arms folded, careful to keep his expression as unapproachable as possible as he watched the chess tournament’s final match.

The banners bearing the red field of the Soviet Flag with its golden hammer and sickle and the red, blue and white of the Union Jack cascaded down from either side of the stage where Gredenko sat across from Updike at a simple wooden table, the pair of them hunched over a boxwood and rosewood chess set. Off on the side of the stage, Maxwell punched a series of buttons, monitoring the blinking green grid on JCN’s screen and periodically running his hand through his untidy mop of hair.

It was supposed to be a game, but both Updike and Gredenko looked to be on edge… whether because their minds were focused on the match, a tournament that was locked up in a tie… or whether they were shaken by the events of that morning, Morse wasn’t sure.

Gredenko took out his handkerchief and mopped his forehead, the stage lights bright on him as he contemplated his next move. A long row of pieces, both white and black, lay fallen on the side of the chessboard. A hush filled the room, as the audience waited with baited breath—it had been a long match, but now it was clear that, one way or another, it would soon be at an end.

But whereas Updike and Gredenko were showing signs of strain, a definite nervousness in their fingers as they moved each piece, Morse kept his gaze steady, in an effort to make himself as forbidding as he could.

He could see Miss Frazil watching him from across the room, almost seeming to percolate with her typical brisk energy, as if she were planning to ambush him at the earliest opportunity. And this time, he’d truly have nothing for her—neither officially nor unofficially.

Nothing much to go on at all, really.

Tony, he could tell, was bemused by his icy demeanor, casting questioning glances his way, glances Morse was determined not to encourage. He was, in fact, keen to avoid Tony at all costs for the duration of this whole affair—he was here—as Dempsey had so annoyingly reminded him—to do a job, and do that job he would. And nothing else.

He wasn’t Pagan.

He wasn’t Morse.

He was here as just a nameless, faceless Constable.

Warrant number 175392. 

Up on the stage, JCN’s screen blinked in a grid of green letters, and Updike followed the computer’s command.

And then… Morse could scarcely believe it.

Checkmate.

Suddenly, the hush was broken with the snap of cameras, lighting up the place like a barrage of popping fireworks, as Gredenko and Updike stood from the small table, reached across the board, and shook hands.

***

As soon as it was over, Morse turned away, stalking back off down the hallway, desiring nothing more than to get away from the lot of it all. After spending so long a time in the dimmed and muted hall, the light emanating from the glass doors seemed to be almost blinding, like two blazing rectangles beckoning to him, as if into another world.

He pushed one of the doors open, welcoming the burst of sweet and autumn-gold air as he stepped out onto the patio, which had now been set with a long table covered in a swan-white cloth, glistening in the sun with rows of upturned champagne flutes and silver ice buckets. Behind the table, five servers in black aprons stood waiting, anticipating the arrival of the crowds.

Turning his mouth down in disapproval at the celebratory air, Morse shoved his hands into his pockets and headed off, off towards the low concrete wall that bordered the lily pond, passing along a series of tall windows and doors set so closely together that it seemed as if the entire wall had been made completely of glass.

Each pane caught his reflection as he went, mirroring him into a multiplication of Morses, an oddly disembodying effect. He almost didn’t recognize himself, rippling along in panel after panel of smooth, cold transparency—his navy suit, his thin face and stubborn chin, his auburn hair, slightly wild in the stiff breeze—all seemed to belong to someone else entirely.

Whoever the hell 1... 5392 was, for example. 

He smoothed his hair down, roughly, with one sweep of his palm, and then went to lean against the wall that bordered the walkway, letting his eyes stray upon the pond below, where large white lilies floated, delicate and dreamlike, upon its dark surface. 

But then, there he was again, reflected in the water—a softer image than the carbon copies created in the glass, but another Morse all the same.

Blurred by the water and framed amongst the blossoms, it was as if the Morse below had stepped out of a pre-Raphaelite painting, one of those images at once too fantastical and too lifelike, that had been the object of Gull’s obsession years ago.

He rested his hand on the rough wall, lost in thought. 

There was some thread, some connection, hidden there, among all the events of the past few days—he was sure of it.

Felt it, as Thursday would say, in his water.

But yet… he couldn’t quite _see_ it.

He felt almost vulnerable, as if, even as he stood here, so solitary in this isolated spot, events around him were spinning wildly out of his control.

He felt like the needle of a compass, circling and circling, as if—if he did not set his own direction, his own course of action, soon—someone else out there—Louis or Singleton or Dempsey or Mathilda Bagshot or even Joss Bixby—might set it for him.

If this was some sort of chess match that he had fallen into, he was determined that he should be a player, and not a pawn.

The wind stirred up, and with it the lilies, drifting as they would always drift, not minding, that they lay in the shadow of such a cursed place, not even in all of their fragile beauty. 

“Beautiful yes?”

Morse looked up. Professor Gredenko was there, standing at his elbow, in his simple suit and orange tie, a champagne flute in his hand and a contemplative expression on his smooth and pleasant face.

“Henry was fond of water lilies. He once told me about this spot. That he often came out here to clear his head.”

“You knew Dr. Ellsworth?” Morse asked.

“Yes. We’ve corresponded for a long time. I was very sad to hear of his death.”

“Chess, you understand,” Gredenko added, in answer to the questioning look on Morse’s face.

Gredenko glanced over his shoulder and then lowered his head.

“It is your responsibility to find out who killed him.”

Morse paused, struck by the man’s sudden intensity.

“He drowned,” Morse said, simply.

But Gredenko’s expression did not falter.

“In my country, people drown also. Sometimes, by accident,” he said.

And then, he took one step closer, so that he was looking searchingly into his eyes, trying to convey as much meaning as he could in what he knew could only be a short space of time, before they were discovered speaking alone.

“You have to catch the person who killed Henry Ellsworth. You should know … our opinions were simpatico upon certain important matters.”

“Such as?”

“The threat to the world posed by the ideologies of our respective governments.”

Morse felt a sudden chill of white walls and skeletal sevens and _I am become death the shatterer of worlds_ … and perhaps … perhaps Ellsworth’s death had nothing to do with the power plant… or with Laxman… or with the chess match…

The professor leaned slightly forward, so that his face was inches from Morse’s ear.

“Last night, I heard one of our… escorts… speaking on the telephone. He wasn’t speaking to anyone back home, anyone in an official capacity. He was speaking in English.”

“To whom?” Morse asked. 

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I’m sure you will agree… the world is a dangerous enough place as it is, without rogue actors complicating things through …. unofficial channels.”

“What was it he was saying?”

“‘You must meet me in the garden for tea.’”

Morse frowned.

Was he having one on him?

_“Meet me in the garden for tea?”_ Morse asked.

Gredenko raised his eyebrows knowingly, as if he too, agreed it was an odd thing for one of the sober-looking men in dark suits to say.

“Gredenko!” a man called.

Morse and Gredenko turned on the spot. One of the men was there, now, watching them with interest.

Gredenko nodded curtly to Morse, as if they had merely been exchanging pleasantries about the weather, and then hurried off.

_“Ya idu,”_ he called.

Morse watched him as he went, mulling over all that he had said.

Someone was clearly arranging a meeting of sorts.

Or, at the very least, instructing someone where they might find something…

But, if so, where?

To do what?

He took a deep breath and then blew it out sharply, as if releasing in the steady swoosh of air some inner tension held inside of him.

There could be an innocent enough explanation, he supposed. Some inverse equation of the clandestine meeting he had witnessed the day before, of Thomas Maxwell and Yulia Vaganova.

Some case of a Russian Romeo who had fallen in love with a Julia or a Juliet rather than a Yulia…

Or..

Well…

It could be any number of things…

But there was one way, perhaps, to get some sort of clue, to help to narrow it down. 

Quietly, he took in the scene at the other end of the patio: the crowds were streaming out through the doors, just beginning to mill about, as the servers wended their way through groups of twos and threes, carrying trays of champagne.

The JCN team was also there, all assembled in an orderly row, Updike and Maxwell and a few post grads, posing under the flash of Miss Frazil’s photographer’s camera.

There was a spirit of sober jubilation in the air, as if JCN’s triumph was Dr. Ellsworth’s best possible memorial, a mood that seemed to lighten as the champagne and conversation began to flow .... and no one was paying him the slightest bit of attention.

Morse stole a quick glance around. Of course, Ellsworth’s rooms must have been cleared out by now, worked over by Dempsey. But even though Dempsey seemed sharper, to be certain, than Louis and Singleton, he might not have caught everything.

Slowly, Morse began to move towards the heavy glass doors, his gait casual and rolling, as if he had no particular aim in mind. As soon as he had sidled up alongside the building, he chanced one last look around, and then he opened the door and slipped inside, pulling the it closed behind him, so no one would notice the slow movement of it returning back into its frame.

Then, he started off, down the corridor and through the empty hall, pausing for a moment before the silent stage. The banners were still hanging, and JCN was still there, standing against the back wall, its green lights steady in hollow victory.

“Forgotten you already, have they?” he murmured.

JCN made no reply, its two large reels of tape utterly stilled.

Morse felt almost sorry for it.

Maybe Tony was right… maybe it did sort of look as if it had a face….

He shrugged, continuing on across the vast room, off towards the familiar linoleum and echoing hallway, casting a look over his shoulder as he went.

When he reached the lab, he walked right past it. It was Dr. Ellsworth’s rooms he was looking for, the place where he might have hidden anything he wanted kept private, not the common space of the offices in which JCN was housed.

He rounded a corner, and there it was—a long and spiraling stair with a streamlined metal railing. He took the steps at a run, his legs pumping, his footsteps echoing through the deserted building.

He hit the top of the staircase and kept going, darting around a corner and heading off at a steady clip, turning his head from side to side, both searching for the right room and keeping watch for any sign of Dempsey.

Finally, at the end of the hall, he came to a door with a simple gold placard reading, _Dr. H. Ellsworth._

He pushed the door open and went inside, closing it behind him. In the center of the room stood a large and imposing desk and a tall black leather chair, framed before high stark modern windows filled with the blue of the soft September sky.

Across the desk, papers wafted forlornly, like rustling leaves.

Either Dr. H. Ellsworth was a bit careless, which Morse highly doubted—he was not an absentminded Greats don, dreaming of bygone days and sweet and ancient rhythms, after all, but rather a man of science and precision—or else the rooms had, indeed, much as Morse had suspected, recently undergone a thorough going-over.

Morse went over and leaned against the desk. A few moments rifling through some of the papers confirmed it: there was no rhyme or reason to any of it. They had been shuffled about, rummaged through, the leavings left to drift.

Odd, for someone who had suffered a “heart attack.”

He turned around, looking over the blonde, modern, angular furniture—the place was nothing at all like Lonsdale, where everything looked as if, if it was left in the woods for two weeks, it would soon be covered in moss. There was no smell of old books, no dark wood paneling set against winter white walls, no scattering of worn rugs or marble busts on pedestals.

Then, his eyes lit upon the bookshelves.

Still.

Academics were academics.

When had he ever met one who wasn’t a bit of a magpie, who didn’t keep bits of paper, scraps of notes or thoughts, tucked into his or her books? How often had he himself tucked something away in a book for safekeeping?

Morse glanced over his shoulder, towards the door. If Dempsey were to find him here, after he had been so unequivocally dismissed, he doubted that Thursday, or even Mr. Bright, could save him.

Quickly, he went over to the shelf, picked up a book, and flipped through it.

And then another.

And another.

And then a stray piece of paper, one that looked as if it had been torn from another, smaller book, fluttered to the floor.

Morse snatched it up and looked at it, his eyes scanning the page in a frantic effort to make sense of the words before him. Because it was the last thing that Morse had expected. Not an equation or notes on a theorem or any sort of code, but rather a simple poem.

_He would declare and could himself believe_

_that the birds there in all the garden round_

_From having heard the daylong voice of Eve_

_Had added to their own, an oversound,_

_Her tone of meaning, but without the words,_

_Admittedly an eloquence so soft_

_Could only have had an influence on birds_

_When call or laughter carried it aloft_

_Be that as it may, she was in their song._

_Moreover, her voice upon their voices crossed_

_Had now persisted in the woods so long_

_That probably it never would be lost._

_Never again would birds’ song be the same._

_And to do that to birds, was why she came._

Morse stood there, in the abandoned office, holding the paper for a long time, lost in thought.

A rather maudlin, longing little thing for a white-bearded and craggy-faced computer researcher.

Wasn’t it?

Morse shoved the poem into his pocket.

Perhaps … just perhaps…

Perhaps he had just come round again to where he had started.

Exactly where he started.

_Love’s very popular. The want of it. A broken heart._

Perhaps Dr. DeBryn had had it right, after all.

***

On the way home, Morse found himself walking along the Cherwell, following a well-worn path bordered by rows of small saplings, just turning to gold.

Up ahead, at the apex of a neogothic bridge that arched over both the path and the river, a young couple stood: a dark-haired man in a mustard shirt and a blonde woman with a blue scarf in her hair, looking like figures on a wedding cake, poised atop a confection made of ornate white limestone rather than of icing.

It was easy enough to read their pantomime. The man pulled out a box and presented it to her. She opened it and smiled. Then, she leaned forward, and he leaned down, until they met in a kiss. And then they stepped in closer still, moving into one another’s arms, in an embrace framed by marbled pink skies.

Morse stopped dead in his tracks.

He had come so close along the path, that he could now see their features clearly.

They weren’t strangers.

But rather colleagues.

Fancy and Trewlove.

A flood of warmth rushed to his face. He felt as if he had blundered through the shrubbery and stole a peek in through their window, even though he had simply been walking along.

He bent his head down, shoved his hands deep into his pockets, and hurried on, with the aim of passing by unnoticed, determined to go straight home, to forget what he had seen, to put all of the long and weary day behind him...

But, when he made his way back out to the main road, he found himself doing something he had not thought to do, something he had not at all intended.  
  


When a cab drove by, he hailed it.

The driver slowed along the kerb, and for a moment, Morse hesitated, put off by the terrible sounds blaring from the car’s radio—a singsong chant just as relentless as any duet of Louis and Singleton’s, overlaid by a beat so insistent that the small cab seemed to shudder with it.

_But after rain must come a rainbow_

_So until then here’s what I doooooo…._

_Make believe you love me, darling._

_Make believe you care,_

_Make believe you need me darling …._

_And I’ll make believe you’re there...._

  
  


Morse stepped back, horrified.

It was like a ring of Dante’s inferno. 

But, already, the cabbie was saying “Where to?”

“Lake Silence,” Morse said.

And then he got in and shut the door.

*****

Morse walked up a cobblestone path that wound through clouds of hydrangeas, the big blossoms of which had been heartbreakingly blue in summer, but which had now faded, fallen to gold in September, as brittle and as fragile as if they were made of old paper. The sky was just drifting into to the softness of evening, with a hint of rose remaining in the west, the trill of two birds calling to one another in the distance the only sound in the warm and heavy air.

He bounded up the grand steps of the old stone and ivy-covered manor house and rang the bell, surprised when Tony himself answered, still dressed in his grey suit with the yellow pocket handkerchief, his tie unstrung around his collar.

“Ah,” he said. “I was thinking you’d be by.” 

Morse furrowed his brow, confused. He had thought his last-minute change of direction the very height of spontaneity.

“Lots of strum and drang at the chess match today,” Tony said.

“Oh,” Morse said. “Yes.”

“You don’t believe that Dr. Ellsworth’s death was suicide, I suppose.”

“No.”

Tony sighed and folded his arms, leaning against the door frame. “Well. I told you before I don’t have any real money tied up in the thing. It’s more of a pastime than anything else. Purely speculative. I’m sure the some of the senior fellows might be in for a windfall if the deal with the plant goes through, but ...”

“I … You know I can’t talk about any of that.”

Tony eyed him bemusedly. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”

“No,” Morse said. “I’m off all that. Special Branch came in. It’s their case now. Or rather, there is no case. A heart attack, they said.”

“A _heart attack?_ ” Tony sputtered. “Isn’t that a notorious code for a cover-up of some sort?”

“Maybe. I dunno. But. I’m not here as Constable Morse,” Morse said.

It was an odd thing to say. As if Constable Morse were someone else entirely from...

Well.

From whoever he was.

A trace of a smile played over Tony’s finely angular face, as if he recognized the absurdity of his words.

“Oh, really?” he asked.

He stepped out of the door, then, all unhurried grace, and tilted his head, considering him.

“Ah,” he said, smoothing out his rumpled lapel. “I should have known. No tin star.” 

Morse quirked a hint of a smile, as a silence fell between them, the kind of silence that only settles in the hush of the evening, the sort that is its own sort of reverence.

“I wondered if you’d fancy a walk?” Morse asked, at last.

“A walk? Why?”

“No reason.”

“You mean… just to walk around? Outside?” Tony asked, as if he had never been in such a place.

Morse rolled his eyes.

_“Tony.”_

“Well, alright,” Tony said. “Why not?”

Tony closed the door smartly behind him, falling in beside Morse as he strolled amongst the hydrangeas, back down the walkway. When they reached the drive, they kept on going, striking off across the lawns, off towards where the firs stood turning to shadows and silhouettes on the horizon.

By the time they reached the edge of the ancient wood, the sky had darkened to a navy blue velvet, the most brilliant of the stars just emerging into view in the east. And still they walked on, the firs and oaks and horse chestnuts towering overhead, the earth soft with scattered leaves below, until they came to the the shore of the lake, and to the old gray cabin that stood alone in the trees, with its weathered wooden steps and wooden rails—and its circular stone pit, where he had sat with Joss Bixby just two summers ago, watching the work of five lost years go up in flames.

It was the same cabin, where, long before that, they had gathered during the summers, when they had all come to stay at Tony’s—he and Susan and Tony and Bruce and Henry and Pippa and Kay—where they had once raced in a pair of old rowboats, bathed in the lake, or simply sat on the shore, wondering at all that might lay before them. 

It seemed odd now, here on the brink of the falling night, to be on standing on this same shore with Tony, thinking of all the things that had brought them to this point.

Morse folded his long legs beneath him and lowered himself to the ground, bracing his hands around one tucked-up knee as he sat looking out over the darkened water. Tony hesitated for a moment before settling down beside him, and it occurred to Morse—in that hesitation—that perhaps Tony had simply been following along wherever he had led, that perhaps he hadn’t realized until that moment that this was where they had been heading, all along.

For a while, they said nothing, and that seemed to confirm it. Tony usually had a penchant for filling any empty space with words, but it seemed tonight as if he had sensed something fey in Morse’s mood, as if he was content enough only to sit, his legs stretched out before him, leaning back against his palms, listening to the quietly lapping water and to the whispering rustle of the leaves.

When the stars grew bright enough to weave themselves into constellations, Morse lay down on the cool and damp earth, casting his face up to them as they shimmered through the leaves, and he could almost hear it: the call of their own voices, from long ago.

Lying thus, he could almost pretend he was an undergraduate again.

Lying thus, he could almost pretend it had never happened.

In the dome of the sky, one red star shone out against the deepening blue, brighter than all the rest.

“There’s Betelgeuse,” Tony mused, following Morse’s gaze.

“I always thought it looked like an ill omen, that star,” Morse replied. “Like the tidings of war.”

“Spoken like a true Greats scholar.”

Morse huffed the faintest breath of a laugh. 

“I’ve heard that light from Betelgeuse takes 640 years to reach the earth,” Tony said. “So that light left in ….”

“1327.”

Morse felt a soft tap, then, against his leg, as Tony nudged him with his knee.

“I was getting there,” he said.

“Sorry.”

Morse sighed, then, heaving a deep breath, so that his stomach rose and fell under the hand resting across it.

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter, really, when the light leaves,” he mused. “As long as it gets there in the end.”

Tony said nothing to that… and what was there to say? It was apparent to even Morse, obtuse as he could be about such things, that it was a statement that could be read any number of ways, that could apply just as easily to him.

To the both of them.

“Do you remember when we used to come out here?” Morse asked.

“Yes,” Tony said. “Of course.”

“Do you ever wish we could go back?”

Morse regretted the question as soon as he had uttered it. It was a tactless question, really. If they _were_ to go back, Morse would not be here, stretched out amidst a sparse scatter of fallen leaves with Tony. He would most likely be out in one of the boats, rowing Susan about out under the stars… she leaning back and laughing her trill of a laugh, while he pulled forward, trying to impress her. Or else, he’d be disappearing with her off into the trees, leaving the others on the shore behind them sitting around a fire slowly turning to red ember.

It was pointless, dragging the past out now. He should let it all fade, slip away into oblivion, off with the quiet closing of the day.... but before Morse could explain, draw the question back again, Tony answered.

“Yes,” he said. 

Morse turned his head to look up at him. Tony had spoken the word with an uncharacteristic solemnity, as solidly and as softly as a vow, and Morse understood at once that he meant something else entirely—that he’d be saddened to see things go back to the way they were before, but that he would accept the world being arranged so, if it meant that he might go back and do things differently.

That he’d give up this moment, now unfolding between them, if it meant that those five years might never had happened.

Morse didn’t know how to answer. But maybe that was the beauty of it: he didn’t have to say anything, or do anything. It was enough just to be, to lay out under the stars, marveling at all that had come before, and all that might be …

It seemed as if his mind, for once, had gone oddly, blissfully, blank—there were no theories, no equations, no formulas, no fear of what lay or might not lay behind the door. The world was not closed off by white walls, but rather an endless black horizon, a dome reaching to a point where the light had left in 1327, and even further, beyond time.

The arm resting lazily across his stomach rose and fell as he lay breathing in the sharpness of the scent of evergreen, the coolness of the night, until he felt almost drunk with a new sort of headiness, as if a song were rising from somewhere within him, until it had to pour out, reaching up towards that red and distant star.

And then, suddenly, he realized that Tony had lain down beside him, his head propped up on one elbow, and that he was looking down at him with a face full of quizzical concern. 

“What is it?” Morse asked.

“Are you….?” Tony asked.

“Am I what?”

“Are you humming … _Make Believe?”_

_“What?_ No, of course not.”

Tony was laughing. “The hell you are.”

And then his face was full of wonder. 

“Who _are_ you?” 

“What do you mean?”

Morse drew his brows sharply together. He didn’t like him to ask him such a thing, not now. Because even though he might not know who he was, exactly, he was _someone_ , not an automaton, not a ghost in a box of white walls … and ...

_“Just five months ago, I was nothing,” Morse had said._

_“Don’t say that,” Tony said._

_“Why not? It’s true.”_

_He wasn’t saying such things to be maudlin. He had lived alone with the numbers until the numbers were all that he had. And he talked to himself until he feared he was going . . . ._

_. . . . and then he had stopped talking all together. And his mind was a blank, unable to process anything but the equations before him on the white wall. And he must solve them one after the other, because if he stopped to think of the reality of his situation, he . . ._

_“I don’t . . .” Morse began,_ _“I don’t want you to call me Pagan anymore.”_

 _“Then what, then?”_

_“You can call me Morse.”_

“Morse?” Tony asked.

Morse opened his eyes, not realizing he had closed them.

“You don’t have to call me Morse,” Morse said, slowly. “Not if you don’t want to.”

Tony's face was still lit with the quirk of a smile. “You can’t mean to say you want to be called Pagan again.”

“No,” Morse said.

“Then what?”

“You could call me Endeavour. I suppose. If you wanted to.”

“I thought you hated that name.”

“I don’t. I do. But. I don’t think I would … if you said it.”

Tony frowned softly, an expression that looked almost comical on his face, as if puzzling over such a riddle was an awfully lot of hard work.

But Morse, for once, didn’t feel his face color, didn’t tug his ear and turn away…

He could trust Tony, after all.

Tony, who always took one step back.

Tony, who would have given him up to have him back his better self.

He would use it cautiously, carefully, not fling the name out to the world.

And after all, even ... even JCN was called JASON, wasn’t it?

“Are you sure you wouldn’t mind?” Tony asked. “It’s been taboo for so long. I always felt as if, if we saw it on a form or such, we were supposed to politely turn the other way, pretend we hadn’t noticed.” 

“I wouldn’t mind. I don’t think so. No. I wouldn’t.”

“Where did this come from?” he asked. 

“I dunno. I’ve just been thinking, I suppose.”

“Mmmm,” Tony said, smiling fondly. “When do you ever do anything else?”

But Morse understood that it wasn’t a criticism.

Only a simple acknowledgment.

It was a part of him, a substantial part to who he was, but it wasn’t all…. he wasn’t JCN, with lights green and steady, standing alone on an empty stage… he was here, lying on the cooling earth, while all the while, the darkening night was turning the world into the dreamscape of his painting, the lapping of the water its own sweet and quiet sort of music.

Morse reached forward, then, and placed his hand on the sharp edge of Tony’s jaw, tracing along its lines with tentative fingers, before raising himself up off the ground, as Tony leaned in, meeting him in a long and quiet kiss. Tony’s mouth on his was warm and slow and searching, and Morse tilted his face for a better angle, relishing in the slight burn of stubble and the lingering scent of Tony’s aftershave, at once so new and so familiar, a scent that somehow sent something within him unwinding, as all the edges blurred, turning soft as water, and all the wheels in his mind slowly drew to a halt.

Tony was right. He did think too much. Flittered too much on the surface of things, connecting one dot and then another…

But there is a knowledge that goes deeper than thought. A knowledge that might elude you—but once you sit for a while amidst the mushrooms and fallen logs at the edge of the mirror of a lake, you might come to realize that you’ve known all along.

_You are going on a journey_ , Mrs. Chattox had said.

 _Let it all recede in the rearview mirror_ , Thursday had said. 

And, surprisingly enough, he was.

And he could. 

He was like the light from Betelgeuse.

There might be something within him that demanded he take the more difficult, circuitous route, but still he beat on.

He endeavoured.

He might be too clever by half, get lost in the threads of his own thoughts, spin theories that seemed fantastical, but that hardly mattered. 

Because he always got there in the end.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter got so long that I just had to break in in half... I really hope this little interlude is enough to stand on its own! :D

Win took a loaf of bread from out of the bread box, preparing to make up the day’s round of sandwiches, while doing her very best to ignore Fred.

But even here, across the hall and a room away, she could sense it, the tension in the house. All of the long morning, his pacing, his irritableness, his restlessly drumming fingers, his short answers, had been slowly wearing on her last nerve.

She sliced off the first piece of bread and glanced up at the little round aqua-blue kitchen clock that hung above the counter. It was already half nine; Sergeant Jakes would be there to fetch Fred and Morse at any moment.

Or, Fred, at least, at any rate.

She set the breadknife down and brushed the crumbs from off her hands and onto the front of her daisy-print half-apron.

Perhaps it was best to have it out with him, to clear the air, before Fred had the chance to take his bad temper out on his unsuspecting sergeant. 

She crossed the hall and went into the living room, only to find her husband, newspaper in hand, scowling before the large, front window. As soon as her shadow had crossed the door, he had rushed to the nearby armchair, raising the newspaper before him, feigning as if he had merely been reading, but his hurried movements and the flick of the lace curtain had not escaped her sharp eye.

“Is there something going on that you’re not telling me about?” she asked.

“What do you mean?” he replied.

“You’ve been jumpy as a sparrow on a fence all morning. It’s clear as clear that there’s something on your mind.”

“There’s nothing,” he said. “It’s fine.” 

“Fred,” she said, knowingly. “I know you better than that.”

But Fred didn’t answer, only turned the page of his newspaper, as if he were thoroughly absorbed in a particularly fascinating article.

“Fred?” she prompted.

“Mmmmm?”

“You do know that Morse is twenty-nine years old, don’t you? He just had a birthday last week, remember?”

“Morse?” he said. “What’s Morse got to do with anything?”

Win could barely refrain from rolling her eyes.

“You just can’t fuss over him like this anymore. If he’s chosen to stay over somewhere, that’s his business. He probably just went to a friend’s and stayed too late for the bus.”

Fred snapped the newspaper down at once in a tremendous rustle.

“And there’s not a telephone, where he is?”

Win sighed and folded her arms before her.

Well.

At least he was abandoning all pretense of making a study of the arts and leisure section now.

“Why should he call you?” Win asked, half a laugh in her voice. “Was he on duty last night?”

“No, but ….” 

“Morse isn’t a child,” she said. “He needs to be able to come and go as he pleases. He doesn’t owe us anything beyond next month’s rent.”

“Morse isn’t just any boarder and you know it,” he replied.

He looked back down at his newspaper, then, and muttered, “Not asking all that much, really. Be nice if he could put a man’s mind at rest, that’s all.”

Win frowned, her sense of assurance faltering.

“So there _is_ something going on,” Win said, shrewdly. “Is there cause to worry?”

But Fred said nothing.

“Fred?”

“You know I can’t talk about that, Winifred.”

Oh, so she was “Winifred” now, was she?

“Don’t know why I bother,” she huffed. “Trying to get anything out of you is like trying to get blood out of a stone.” 

But Fred didn’t have the chance to reply, to pontificate once more about the virtues of the hall stand, because, just then, the room was vibrating with a low rumble, with the sound of a car pulling into their drive, and immediately, Fred sprung from his chair to look back out the window.

Win, too, turned to look out through the cut-out lace curtains. Outside, Morse was there, getting out of a familiar glossy blue automobile with an enormous silver grill that gleamed as bright as a freshly-polished mirror in the morning sun.

“I don’t believe it,” Fred seethed. “I don’t _ruddy_ well believe it. Here I was … and all this time….”

He tossed the newspaper to the floor and tore out of the room, turning—not towards the front door, as she had expected—but off into the dining room.

Evidently, then, his plan was to sit and glower, most likely rake Morse over the coals with a combination of castigating glares and a heavy dose of the silent treatment.

Well.

Better than the alternative, anyway.

The last thing he needed to do was to confront Morse directly, as he had once years ago; that would have been sure only to fuel bad tempers on both sides.

Not to mention that such a scene was the very last thing Sergeant Jakes needed to stumble upon first thing in the morning.

Although, when she thought about it, he might simply find it amusing.

Perhaps it was the last thing that Morse needed, then.

She shook her head in despair at the pair of them and then reached down to pick up the newspaper that Fred had thrown to the floor in his rush to hoof it away from the window, sailing out into the hall just as Morse was coming in through the front door.

“Hello, Morse,” she said, brightly.

Morse ground to a halt on the spot, his eyes wide, looking as awkward as a deer caught in the headlights. He hovered back and forth on his feet for a moment, as if not quite sure what to do with himself, and then he nodded, circled around her, and bolted up the stairs. 

She watched him as he flew up the steps to the landing—partly amused by his display of gawkiness, partly sympathetic to his discomfiture.

Too late, she realized that he had most likely hoped to have come into an empty hall, to have made it up to his room unseen—that it would have been the kinder course to have stayed in the living room until he had managed to get up to his room.

But how was she have to have known that he would appear on their doorstep so rumpled and disheveled, flustered in such a manner that, as to his activities of the night before, didn’t leave all that much to the imagination?

He might have simply come in a bit more naturally, said hello and spared them both their blushes.

She picked a single leaf from off the hallway carpet runner, then, and went back into the kitchen, casting an eye towards Fred, who was sitting in the dining room scowling over his tea, as she passed. 

She tossed the wayward leaf into the bin and the newspaper onto the counter and then returned to slicing the loaf of bread she had left out on cutting board.

Well, there was no use denying it. Their household was changing.

And Fred was going to have to change along with it.

She didn’t understand it, really. For years, anything concerning the kids had been her domain. Fred wouldn’t have known how to take them to buy a new pair of school shoes, let alone have been capable of taking them in for a doctor’s appointment. The immunization schedules and report cards, Girl Guide meetings and new football cleats, the bagged lunches and birthday parties—had all been left for her to deal, as part of her sphere.

But now—now that Joan and Sam, and even Morse, who had come to them already grown, really—were preparing to shoot out of his grasp, he suddenly seemed to feel the need to put his oar in at every turn, full of criticism and unwelcome advice, as if he might freeze time, hold them just as they were.

He had already driven Joan away once with his overbearingness. And now, lately, it seemed as if Morse was constantly catapulting out of his good graces.

Fred needed to understand that Morse had not been the blank slate that he might have appeared to be in his first days amongst them. He had been on his own before, a student at Oxford, after all.

He hadn’t come to them standing on the first rung of the ladder, but had rather been …. well.... interrupted.

The infuriating thing of it was, if Fred didn’t learn how to give them all some space, then all of her complicated dance of one step forward, one back, balancing on the line between being present if they needed her, but not leaping in their way when they didn’t—would all be for naught.

And they both of them would have some lonely Christmases ahead.

She set the slices of bread aside and went to the refrigerator to retrieve a package of ham and a fresh tomato.

As for Morse’s part, if he was going to feel uncomfortable around them, perhaps it was high time that he found his own place. She would miss him, of course, as keenly as she missed Joan and would soon be missing Sam, but it was what she’d signed on for, after all.

It was part of the job description, rendering yourself obsolete.

She cut the red, ripe tomato into nice, even slices and was just opening a packet of ham when the doorbell rang, and, in a few moments, she heard Sergeant Jakes’ voice out in the dining room.

Hurriedly, she assembled the sandwiches and went out for a quick chat, hoping to hold them for a bit, lest Fred was thinking of leaving Morse behind again.

Seemed as if they could give him a few minutes, at least.

“Morning,” she called.

Sergeant Jakes was standing by the table in a freshly pressed suit, his hair slicked back so that not one strand was out of place, and, as she came into the doorway, he gave her his typical easy smile.

“Mrs. Thursday,” he said, with a polite nod. 

“Well, love,” Fred said. “We’re off, then.”

Win was just about to ask if they couldn’t wait a minute more for Morse, when there was a thunder like a stampede of elephants roaring down their narrow stair. In the next moment, Morse came hurtling into the room, looking a bit more put together than he had a few minutes earlier, although not by much: his hair was damp and waving wildly, his face pink from a quick shower, and—although he had put on a fresh suit—his jacket was unbuttoned at the bottom, revealing a broad swath of white shirt beneath.

Jakes’ deep-set eyes raked over Morse’s somewhat untidy figure, and then he smirked.

“Was it good?” he asked.

Morse paled, looking horrified.

_“What?”_ he stammered.

“The book you were reading last night,” Jakes said. “Christ, Morse. You’re a mess. What time did you get to bed?”

And then Morse’s face flushed, turning a deeper shade of red than had anything to do with his recent hasty shower. 

“Oh,” Morse said. “Yes. It was... it was .... Catullus.”

He winced at the word, making a pained face, as if he had given something away.

He needn’t have worried. The reference was lost on all of them.

Although Win suspected that copies of that Latin author found in school libraries might be rather well-thumbed.

Fred scowled, doing little to hide his annoyance with the whole exchange, his jaw clenched tight. He seemed almost to be looking past Morse, as if he was not there, whereas Morse, strangely enough, appeared to be oddly conciliatory.

Perhaps there _was_ something going on, then, at work. Perhaps Fred had had cause to worry, and Morse knew it.

Jakes, in the meanwhile, was still smirking over Morse’s less-than-polished appearance.

Poor lad.

Might not be smirking for long if he found himself caught in the crossfire between Fred and Morse for the bulk of the day.

Fred stepped over to her, then, and gave her his customary good-bye peck on the cheek.

“Wait,” she said. “Your sandwiches.”

She spun back into the kitchen and tossed another sandwich together, returning to the dining room with three square wrapped packages, tucking one of them into Fred’s coat pocket as she gave him a quick kiss.

“Come home safe,” she said.

She handed one to Morse, then, who took it without quite making eye contact, and then passed the third one to Jakes. 

With the day he was likely to have ahead, she thought he might need a little pick-me-up.

She half-expected Jakes to flash his casual smile, to make some clever remark. She had a feeling that her sandwich schedule had long been the butt of more than one joke down at the nick. But instead, he looked oddly sober.

“Thank you, Mrs. Thursday,” he said.

Win only nodded, an odd lump forming in her throat.

The startled look he had given her, just barely discernible under his careless façade, as if such a simple kindness was quite a surprising thing, made her feel as if she’d been missing something—made her wish that she’d been packing an extra sandwich every day, all along.

****

Morse sat at his desk in his cramped little corner, hemmed in by the metal black filing cabinets that loomed over his chair behind him and the coiled white radiators right at his elbow.

How apropos.

He was in a box, going nowhere, tossed from department to department and hitting walls at every turn.

Max, just as he had suspected, had barely had a chance to have a look at Dr. Ellsworth’s body, before he, too, had been paid a visit by Special Branch.

And, now, Morse had spent the better part of the hour on the telephone, without the slightest thing to show for it.

He twisted the black spiraling cord in his hand, as if it were a spider web entrapping him, clinging to his skin.

“In the last two hours, I have spoken to the Atomic Energy Authority, who referred me to the MoD. The MoD have referred me to the Permanent Undersecretary’s office, who referred me to you. I just want to know how I can get access to the Bramford Power Station.”

“I’m sorry,” the man on the line said. “You’ll have to speak to Mr. Hopkins. At the Atomic Energy Authority.”

“But I’ve already spoken to him an hour ago,” Morse protested. “He’s the one who told me to call the MoD.”

Morse picked up a pen from off of the desk, then, clicking it to relieve his nerves, which felt brittle, raw, driven to the breaking point by the infuriating stupidity of an endless chain of bureaucrats.

“I’m sorry, Constable. I’ve only been working here a week. That’s what I’ve been told.”

“Is there any one there who has been working there _more_ than a week?” Morse asked.

“Not at the moment, no. If you’d like to leave a message, someone can ring you back in five to seven business days. Mr. Hopkins, perhaps.”

He was about to tell the man again that he had already spoken to Mr. Hopkins, but what was the point?

“Right,” Morse said. “Right. Well, thank you for nothing.”

He slammed down the receiver with such force that the inner mechanism sounded with a harsh metallic clang, and then he leaned back in his chair, bracing his hands up on top of the crown of his head and exhaling sharply in frustration.

Across the room, Jakes, Strange and Thursday, gathered in a hushed cabal around Jakes’ desk, looked up at him, their attention drawn away from whatever it was they were discussing—something about checking for fingerprints on the underside of a stamp, from what he had overheard—by his sudden outburst.

Morse ducked his head down to elude their scrutiny and went to pick up the receiver to try once more, when, just then, Fancy came bounding over from his desk.

“Sir?” he called out, to Thursday. “We’ve just got a call in about a trespasser.”

“A trespasser?” Thursday asked. 

“Some farmer, by the name of Bryton,” Fancy said, flipping his fringe from his eyes. “Says someone’s been lurking around his land these past few days, spooking his cows, and now a horse has gone missing.”

Morse frowned, his hand poised above the rotary dial, steeling himself for what most assuredly was coming next.

And, sure enough, Thursday’s narrowed gaze fell immediately on him.

“Morse? You’ve nothing in, have you? Why don’t you head over? Take a look-see?”

Perfect.

Sounded like the perfect equation for a wasted day.

“A missing horse, sir?” Morse protested. “With all of this on? I’m supposed to go wandering around after a missing horse?”

“With all of what on?” Thursday asked, laconically.

“Why, Dr. Ellsworth, for one.”

“You heard the man yesterday. We’re off that.”

“Well…” Morse sputtered, “What about Laxman?”

“We’re off that, too.”

_“What?”_

“Didn’t I tell you?” Thursday asked, before answering his own question. “Oh, I suppose not, seeing as I didn’t get the chance last night. Word has come down from Division. A pair of lost glasses isn’t enough to reopen an investigation, it seems.”

“But…” Morse said, “I’ve been trying for an hour to….”

“Didn’t you hear what I just said, Constable? There’s nothing else on. It’s this trespasser you’ve got to look into.”

Jakes smiled. “Time to get off your high horse, Constable Morse,” he said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Morse snapped.

“Means that that chess match is over. Looks like your coach has turned back into a pumpkin, Cinderella. Time to get back to general duties.”

Morse rolled his eyes at Jakes’ stunning display of wit.

“So,” Morse queried, then, “where is this presumably stolen horse I’m supposed to waste the day on?”

Fancy glanced down at the yellow scrap of notepaper in his hand.

“Out near Bramford,” he said.

Morse knocked his desk two inches forward, sending his reading lamp and telephone rattling, in his haste to scramble to his feet.

“Bramford?” he asked.

Thursday’s smug expression faded, and he looked at him archly. “To look for a horse, Morse. That’s all.”

Jakes was still smiling. “You see, Morse. The perfect case for you. You must be pretty well-acquainted with all the other misfits out there from your little trip last week.”

Thursday’s broad face swung, then, immediately to Jakes. 

“You look like you’ve some time on your hands, Sergeant,” he said. “Why don’t you go over with him?”

The smile on Jakes’ face died out at once.

“Sir?” he asked.

“Two sets of eyes are better than one,” he replied evenly.

Thursday’s pointed words were not lost on Morse. He snatched his jacket off the back of his chair with such force that he sent it scraping against the lino floor.

So that’s why Jakes was being sent out with him, was it? To babysit him?

It was ridiculous. He didn’t need protecting. And he certainly didn’t need minding.

In the meanwhile, Jakes was slowly gathering up his jacket, careful to fold it over his arm in his typical fastidious manner, and then he nodded grimly towards the door as Morse fell into step beside him.

As they made their way out through the cluttered maze of the nick, they passed Fancy, who had wandered back over to his desk and was smiling softly to himself as he picked up a file, in a show of good humor that was too much, evidently, for Jakes.

“What do you have to be so happy about?” he asked.

Fancy glanced up, surprised.

“It’s a nice day, is all. Lovely this time of year.”

Jakes looked at him as if he had never seen him before.

And, indeed, it wasn’t quite like Fancy to use such a phrase as _‘lovely this time of year.’_

Jakes regarded Fancy for a long moment and then turned away, and Morse fell into step beside him once more, heading along with him out through the double doors of the CID and into the dingy and echoing tiled corridor.

“Poor kid,” Jakes murmured, once they were out on the stairs. “Probably putting a brave face on it. What do you think Trewlove thought of that necklace? Warned him not to reach beyond his grasp.”

“Hmmmmm,” Morse said.

With the mood Sergeant Jakes was in, and considering that he’d have to spend the next few hours in his company, Morse figured that, for once, it would be better to hold his tongue, even though it went against the grain.

He could just sense it, somehow, that this was the wrong time to tell Jakes that—once again—he had it all completely wrong.

****

Jakes should have known Morse would pull some crap like this.

They had spent the better part of two hours traipsing around pastures, up hills and down, striding though high and rippling green grass, on an endless and meandering march under the steadily climbing September sun, only to end up here. 

Morse had long since shed his jacket and rolled his white shirtsleeves up to his elbows, while all the while his face had been steadily flushing into a bronzed red that made his freckles pop out all the more visibly across the bridge of his nose.

Because Morse had been out and about in the area before, canvasing about the Laxman case, Jakes thought nothing of it, at first, when Morse led him into the trees—thought that he was merely going after a bit of shade.

Either the horse or the trespasser in question had to be about somewhere. Could just as easily be in the cool green woods as in the sun-swept fields.

But then, coincidentally enough, it wasn’t all that long before the quaint pastoral scene was undercut by the sight of a high electric fence, topped with rolls of barbed wire, skirting its way through the maples and lindens.

Morse looked at the fence longingly, in just the same way that he was wont to look at a pint of beer sitting in a tall tankard before him on a rough oak table down at the Lamb and Flag.

“Better knock it off, Morse,” Jakes said.

Morse turned to him sharply.

“I haven’t done anything,” he said.

“You’re thinking it.”

“Oh. So do you presume to have the power to read minds, now? Maybe you should consider moving out here. You can set up a fortune teller’s stall next equinox.”

“Nothing to do with reading minds, Morse. I can see it right on your face.”

Morse made a tetchy face at that, thereby proving his point.

He liked to think of himself as inscrutable, Morse.

But the truth was, he was as transparent as glass.

Once an idea started rattling around in that jumble-sale brain of his, you couldn’t get it out.

Jakes would never stoop so low as to say it out loud, but the truth of it was, it was easy to see, really, why a lunatic like Clive Durrell would have zeroed in on old Morse. Anyone else would have fizzled out after a few months. Only someone like Morse would the stamina to have covered the walls of that little crucible with all of that rubbish, over and over again, for five years.

Jakes shuddered with the memory of it, of stumbling upon that low, little room hidden in the big old house, of how the front door of the place had been flanked by climbing roses, looking oh-so-nice from the pavement, just as if it were simply the home of any respectable mathematics don and not some sick, twisted sort prison. 

They were everywhere, those sorts.

“Just forget about that power station, that’s all,” Jakes said. “Your warrant card doesn’t buy you into a place like that.”

“Well, it should,” Morse said. “But then, I wouldn’t want to break with any _regulations.”_

Little swot. The way he said the last word, as if following protocol was such a terrible thing. A weak thing.

When it was neither. It was all simply part of the rules of the game. How it was played.

Sometimes, Jakes wanted to ask him. Is it worth it? Throwing yourself up against it, again and again and again?

Morse was supposed to be so brilliant, so clever.

But wasn’t that the very definition of stupidity? How else to describe someone who never learns, who stubbornly makes the same mistake over and over?

Eh, bugger it.

Before the month was over, Morse was most assuredly going over that fence. It was inevitable as rain.

He pulled a cigarette out of a silver case, frowning softly when he found he had only three left.

He’d have to make it a point to ration them if he were to be spending the next few hours with Morse.

He lit the cigarette with a flash of his lighter, and, when he glanced up, he realized that Morse was watching him with alert eyes, his body tense, as if he were straining after something.

And then Jakes heard it, too.

Whistling.

It was a quiet little quiver of notes, almost like the trill of a bird, just barely perceptible.

Jakes stopped to listen, trying to make sense of it, trying to form it into a tune, so absorbed by the sound that it took him a moment to realize that Morse had already headed off through the trees.

He quickened his pace to catch up with him, and soon they came upon a man lurking along a thicket. He was an odd sort of bloke, dressed in a rumpled, tartan jacket with a pair of binoculars strung ‘round his neck and an a broad-brimmed sun hat, offset by a pair thick glasses that magnified his eyes so much that he looked a bit like an overcurious grasshopper.

“Oy!” Jakes called.

The man, who had just been poised to write something in a small notebook, looked up at his shout.

“What are you doing out here?” Jakes asked.

The man said nothing, only blinked from behind his glasses, as if he were a bit slow on the uptake.

“Sergeant Jakes, Oxford City Police,” he said, then, flashing his warrant card from his pocket. 

“Ah,” the man said.

“We’ve had a call in about a trespasser out this way. Stolen a horse, perhaps.”

“A horse?” the man queried. “I haven’t seen any horses. But then, I’ve been looking into the trees, chiefly. No horses up there. Unless it’s a horsefly, of course.”

He laughed then, a dry chuckle, as if pleased by his own little joke.

Jakes grimaced.

One of these socially-inept academic types, most likely, whose sad attempts at humor always hit the wrong note, and—sure enough—the man’s next words did not surprise him in the slightest.

“I’m a professor at Beaufort College,” he said, “studying the migratory patterns of the common grackle.”

Beside him, Morse snorted.

“A bit off course, aren’t you?” he huffed.

Jakes thought that Morse was alluding to the fact that the man was trespassing, straying far too near the perimeter of the Bramford Power Station, that Morse was about to tell him to clear off.

But, instead, Morse announced, “The grackle is indigenous to North America.”

The professor widened his dark eyes at Morse alarmingly from behind his ridiculous glasses—the ones that made him look like a character in a movie’s deranged twin—as if Morse had completely missed his point, as if convinced that he must be as thick as his corrective lenses, and Jakes couldn’t say that he blamed him.

Leave it to Morse to give a lecture on birds to a bloody ornithologist.

And then—Jakes could scarcely believe what happened next.

The Beaufort professor looked straight at Morse and _winked_ at him.

Morse startled, his face flushing to an even deeper shade of red, as if he’d been far too long out in the sun.

And, what do you know?

Looked as if these so-called grackles were about the only birds the professor was interested in.

Morse didn’t seem to know what to think. He simply stood there for a moment, looking utterly befuddled, for once in his life knocked absolutely speechless—and then—it was incredible—the professor gave him a tiny, knowing little jerk of his head—bold as brass, with Jakes standing right there amongst them—as if to ask Morse if there wasn’t some way they could get rid of him, have a cozy little chat in private.

Oh, Jesus.

Not bloody likely.

“All right,” Jakes said. “That’s enough, now.”

The man spread his hands wide, still holding a notebook in one hand and a pen in the other.

“Enough of what?”

“You know what. Better call off your little ‘nature study’ for the day, until this horse is found, all right? Otherwise, you might very well find yourself a person of interest.”

The man swept his hat from off his head and gave a theatrical little bow.

What a gallant.

“Sergeant,” he said.

And then he turned and made his way off through the trees, while Morse stared after him, still wearing an expression appropriate to one who’d been clubbed over the head.

Jakes took a drag on his cigarette, regarding him in disbelief.

Even Morse couldn’t be that desperate.

He reached out and put his hand on Morse’s bony shoulder, spinning him around so that he was facing the opposite direction.

“Let’s go, Constable,” he said.

Morse started along with him, but it wasn’t long before he cast a look back through the trees, back over his shoulder. It was as if he was besotted, as if something about the man had struck some sort of chord in him.

Sort of sad, really, to see how little it took. But what else could you expect? Poor sod, going about always so chronically untouched, always holed up alone with those bonkers paintings all over his walls, his nose in a book or listening to one of his awful, screeching records.

He should have a little more faith in himself. Put himself out there a bit more.

He wasn’t all that bad to look at, really.

Usually, he had some sort of sour expression on his face, clicking his pen and hunched over his desk in his dumpy and disheveled little corner.

But out here, in the natural light, with his sleeves rolled up, his hair gone tawny gold and his face flushed in the sun, his expression dazed with a surprise that bordered on wonder, he looked alright, actually. Maybe better than all right, even. All sharp cheekbones softened by a spray of freckles and those big, hungering blue eyes.

He did have a weird, gawkish sort of charm.

If ... you know....

One went in for that sort of thing.

***

Morse’s torch shone brightly through the trees, lighting up the bark so that the brilliant and shadowed textured trunks shone in the night like ghosts—ghosts that flickered as the beam of light swayed from side to side with each of his hurried steps.

The night lay soft and silent around him, so that the only sound was the scuffle up his footfalls through fallen leaves diffused with the ripe, sweet scent of autumn.

He could sense he was nearly there, and he lengthened his stride, his heart pounding with adrenaline more than with the effort.

Because there it was: the high and soaring chain-link fence topped with enormous rolls of barbed wire that divided the woods and pastures of Bramford Mere from the property owned by the power plant.

He approached the fence and then skirted alongside of it, careful not to touch it lest it carried a charge—which, most likely, it did—noting the “No Trespassing” signs designated at every twenty feet.

And then, suddenly, in the darkness, he made out a lone figure. He started to call out to it, but then swallowed the sound down again, cutting his voice short with a gulp.

Hurriedly, he clicked off his torch.

The figure was within the fence, rather than without.

A night watchman, pacing the perimeter of the grounds.

Not Bixby.

Quietly, Morse slipped back into the trees, taking his place behind a large oak, resting his hands on the rough bark and watching the man’s progress as he came nearer and nearer, passed by him, and then continued on his way.

It was madness, surely, to meet out here in the dead of night.

But he was sure he had not misunderstood it, that infinitesimal jerk of Bixby’s head towards the high, wire fence.

_Interested into getting into that power station?_

_Because I certainly am._

Surely, though, they might have found someplace safer to meet, to discuss plans before simply barreling on in there, especially when few would be available for questioning anyhow.

And then it struck him.

This was not at all where they were supposed to meet.

Morse turned, then, pivoting on the spot, and started running, off through the woods and back to where the squad car lay hidden, parked along a stand of trees just off the main road.

For once, Jakes had a point.

He’d hate to think of what would happen if he didn’t get that car back in time, before it was noticed that he’d checked it out on the flimsiest of reasons.

He really was Cinderella, it seemed, racing the clock towards Lake Silence, racing the clock on towards midnight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter—Morse’s meeting with Bixby—will be up Monday! Or maybe even sooner...  
> Thanks for reading!


	12. Chapter 12

The sweet and heady scent of smoke hanging heavily in the cool night air reached him long before he could see the faint outline of the lake house through the trees, and Morse—assured that he was on the right track this time—quickened his pace.

Soon, the outline of the little gray clapboard cabin standing silently amidst the fir trees came into view, ghost-like in the watery moonlight, and Morse drew to a halt, overcome with a wistful sense of déjà vu, a swooping sensation in his gut that was something akin to homesickness.

It had been just that morning that he had lain there on the lake house’s narrow camp bed, waking to a moment of absolute peace, a stillness which he had not known for almost as long as he could remember, his every limb sinking into the old mattress, sated and heavy with sleep.

Even now, after all of this time, he so often woke to a haze of confusion, half-expecting to see white walls scrawled over with the numbers and equations that had once been the sum of his life—that, indeed, he had lived inside _of_ , literally as well as figuratively—until his conscious mind had the chance to catch up with him, to quell that sense of panic washed over with dull resignation that he had known for so many years. 

How different it had been, waking that morning in the silence of the lake house, stretched out alongside of Tony—to sense the warmth there beside him, the uneven dip in the mattress that told of another’s weight, of the reassurance of another’s presence, before he had even opened his eyes.

He had woken slowly to the scent of evergreen and aftershave, dizzy with the realization that the trees and the lake were just a step outside his door.

And that, if he wanted, he could open his mouth and speak, and someone would hear him.

And that he was not alone.

Morse had known that he should be getting back, that he might risk missing Jakes when he came ’round for them in the black Jag, but he couldn’t seem to help himself: for a long while, he simply lay there, pressed up between Tony and the wall on the tiny bed, awake but still, remembering another far different morning, a morning when he had lain on the cold, seafoam-green tile floor of Bixby’s bathroom, his head splitting with his first hangover, chastising himself for what had seemed like childish dreams.

That, when he grew up, he’d be a policeman. That his best friend would fall in love with him and they’d run away to live in a tree house, away from all the cares of the world.

How, astonishingly enough, it seemed as if his dreams had come true without him even noticing it.

_Yesterday Calvus, idle day we played with my writing tablets, harmonizing in being delightful: scribbling verses, each of us playing with meters, this and that, reciting together, through laugher and wine...._

_I left there fired with your charm, Calvus, and your wit, so that, restless, I couldn’t eat, nor rest my eyes quietly in sleep, but tossed the whole bed about wildly in passion, longing to see the light, so that I might speak to you, and be with you…_

_Kiss me softly and speak to me low…_

And even now, as Morse stood there in the darkness, he could almost hear the whisper of Latin verses like wind rustling in the trees, even though the night was still and the air felt charged with a far different sort of electricity—with the thought that answers, at long last, might be close at hand…..

And so Morse swallowed, and hurried on, moving quickly through the thinning trees, until he was passing by the little cabin, approaching the shore of Lake Silence.

Once he reached the clearing at the edge of the water, he found that he had it right this time: Joss Bixby was there, one leg drawn up, the other stretched out before him, looking contemplatively into a fire that blazed like a sun in the darkness, in the center of the old stone ring.

Bixby looked up at the sound of Morse’s footfalls through the dry leaves.

“Ah,” he said. “There you are, old man. I’ve been thinking that perhaps you wouldn’t turn up, after all.”

“Sorry,” Morse said. “I went out to Bramford Mere first. To see if you were still there.”

“Bramford?” Bixby asked. “Why, this is the appointed rendezvous point, didn’t you know?”

“No,” Morse said. “You ... you’ve never called it that.”

“Well, of course, I haven’t. What’s the point of having a secret appointed rendezvous point if you speak of it? It’s simply meant to be understood.”

Morse, having no retort, decided that—as was the case with so many things concerning Joss Bixby—it was best just to go along. 

“So,” Bixby asked. “If you were out at Bramford … Did you happen to go along the fence, then? You didn’t happen to run into any guards, did you?”

Morse’s heart began to race, beating like a thrashing bird high in his chest.

From the way he posed the question, it seemed that he had been right: that Bixby, too, had an interest in the power station.

Morse crossed over the small patch of barren earth, skirting the wildly crackling fire that sent the high surrounding trees blazing with light and odd, flickering shadows, drawing up alongside of Bixby and then lowering himself to the ground beside him.

And again, he felt it: a plunging rush of a memory—but one of another night, two years ago, one with an entirely different feel to it—not of peace, but of terror and then catharsis—when Bixby had given him the chance to finish what he had started and then to consign the lot of it to the flames.

Morse could almost see him standing there before him—the ghost of his former self—wearing a similar white shirt, but otherwise, so different—his face narrower, pale from years spent indoors, dropping a stack of papers into the fire and sending orange sparks flying into the sky only to float down again, as snowflakes of black ash.

He shook his head, lightly, as if to dispel the thought of it, suddenly aware that Bixby was watching him with a perplexed expression on his face ... leading Morse to the slow realization that he must have asked him something, and he had missed it. 

“What?” Morse asked.

“I said, ‘Did Dempsey overlook anything?’” Bixby asked.

For a long while, Morse simply stared at him, taking in all of the implications of the question.

They were in accord, then.

Bixby _did_ think that the plant had perhaps something to do with Laxman’s disappearance.

And that Laxman’s disappearance, perhaps, might be connected to Ellsworth’s death, too.

Morse reached into his pocket, and Bixby raised his eyebrows, bemused, before breaking into an arch smile—and Morse understood that Bixby had been half-joking, that he hadn’t truly been banking on Morse doing such a thing, conducting his own, clandestine search of Dr. Ellsworth’s office, but that he wasn’t completely shocked that he might do so, either.

Morse pulled out the poem and placed it into Bixby’s outstretched hand. Bix took the paper at once and began to read, the two small fires reflected in his dark eyes moving from side to side as he scanned the page eagerly.

Then, a faint crease formed between his brows.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“It’s a poem,” Morse said simply. 

“I know it’s a _poem._ But what does it mean?

“It’s a sonnet. Well. A bit of an elegy, too, really. It's obtensibly about Eve, but it's really about his lost beloved. She was so lovely, her voice has changed the notes of the birdsong, and he hears her there still. _Never again would birdsong be the same. And to do that to birds was why she came_.” 

“I don’t mean literally,” he huffed.

Bixby frowned, scrutinizing the words, as if hoping they might reveal some hidden meaning, some code or untold secret.

“This is what you took from Ellsworth’s office? You had everything at your fingertips, and _this_ is what you came away with?”

“What?” Morse asked. “You don’t think it’s highly unusual that a man like Dr. Ellsworth would keep a sentimental little lyric hidden amongst his books?”

Bixby said nothing, only looked once more over the paper in bleak disappointment.

“Well,” he sighed, at last. “You tried your best, old man.”

“What were you expecting?” Morse cried.

“I don’t know,” Bixby replied. “Some evidence that Ellsworth might have been have been colluding with the Soviets? Selling some of the research they’ve been working on up at Lovelace College? Extra copies of detailed plans of the power station meant to be strictly _verboten._ Any indication at all that he might have been up to something that ran him afoul of someone?”

“But Dempsey would have taken any evidence of that, surely,” Morse protested.

Bixby waved a dismissive hand at the words. “Dempsey,” he scoffed. “Dempsey doesn’t know what he’s looking for. Not like you do.”

The words hit Morse with all the force of a slap, so that the world seemed almost to reel around him.

So, that was it, then? Bixby wasn’t consulting with him as a police officer, as a good detective, as a rival intelligence against whom to test his mettle, but as Agent X, an automaton good only for recognizing its own blind handiwork, a useful tool?

Or worse, a useful fool?

He, Morse, had been a Greats man. Higher mathematics, speculative physics—all of that had never been his area of interest, his area of expertise. It had all just been drilled into him, broken into him, really, along with the bones of his right hand.

“Maybe I don’t know all that much about such things,” Morse said, shortly. “Not really.”

He snatched the poem away and shoved it back inside his jacket pocket. It wasn’t _so_ very ridiculous. Had he not just handled a case in which a young woman had stolen a jewel for love? It was a thing that moved people beyond reason, that should never be ruled out, as a motivation.

“Ah,” Bixby said. “Now I’ve annoyed you.”

“No,” Morse said, although the odd way that the syllable burst out of him seemed to give the lie to the word.

Bixby’s eyes were trained carefully on his face, as if easily reading the expression there.

“Of course, I have,” Bixby said. “You should just say it.”

“Say what?” Morse asked, hotly.

“Just… whatever it is that you’re thinking. That I’m a bastard.”

“Hmmmmm,” Morse said.

“Go on,” Bixby urged. 

And it was tempting, it was right there, on the tip of his tongue.

_“You’re a bastard.”_

Who was Bixby, really, to drag him out here, at this hour? What help would he be to him, really? At the end of the day, Bixby was only interested in his own ends, interested in how Morse might help him on his case. 

When it was clear as day that this was his, Morse’s, case.

“Well, you might,” Bixby murmured, darkly. “It’s not as if I managed to get into Ellsworth’s office at all, with Dempsey about. I’m a little too well-known in those circles, I'm afraid, to have risked it.”

His contempt for himself was clear in his voice, and it was so unlike the posturing Bixby that Morse had known that it struck an odd note, like a record needle suddenly hitting a scratch, skipping over a few notes in a well-known piece of music.

Morse watched him thoughtfully, his flare of anger beginning to soften in the face of the man’s greater disappointment in himself ... until it reached the point that Morse’s curiosity outweighed his anger … because …

Because weren’t Bixby and Dempsey supposed to be on the same _side?_

“Why was Dempsey there?” Morse asked. “Why send someone new? Why not send Louis and Singleton out to intercept me, if Special Branch wanted any investigation into Ellsworth’s death shut down?”

“Why indeed?” Bixby replied, heavily.

Morse scowled. He was so used to Bixby having the answers, that it was odd to find him so similarly puzzled.

Although Morse felt sure that he knew more than he was letting on.

“That’s rather … enigmatic….” Morse prompted.

For a moment, Bixby said nothing, only looked meditatively into the fire, the twin lights shining in his dark eyes, and, suddenly, Morse found himself flooded with a new restlessness, his legs almost shaking with it.

He had shown Bixby what he had found in Dr. Ellsworth’s office, even if he seemed to feel that it was of little value; Bixby could either tell him what he knew, return the favor, make this meeting a two-way street, or he, Morse, was springing to his feet, he was leaving—he was done with it, finished with it, with a life of being kept on the margins, told only to complete the task before him, to do what he was told without being allowed in on the larger picture.

He was just beginning roll himself forward, to leap up to his feet, to head off through the trees, leaving all of it—the snapping fire, the forlorn little cabin, the black lake shimmering quietly under the starlight, and most of all, Bixby far, far behind him, when Bixby, after a thoughtful pause, suddenly began to speak.

“Back in April of ’62, I was assigned a case. At Bramford.”

And Morse settled back down again, drawing one knee up before him.

“The plant had been in operation for only a year. All was fresh and new—state of the art engineering, top-qualified operators from Oxford and Cambridge and Stanford … and suddenly … there was a blip.”

“A blip?”

“A leak.”

“ _A leak?”_

“A small one. Evidently, water contaminated with tritium had pooled on the floor inside the turbine building and made its way outside into the groundwater monitoring test well.”

“And it was all covered up?” Morse cried, outraged.

“No,” Bixby said. “Not exactly. More … minimized, you could say. It was a remote area, the wastewater was only mildly radioactive, it was only a few thousand gallons released, a trifling amount. The public was reassured that there was no cause for alarm, that there was no danger.” 

“But Laxman didn’t believe that,” Morse ventured. “And so he started making a study of the plants in the area. And someone was afraid that, given time, his research might reveal the uncomfortable truth.” 

“That’s what I thought, later on,” Bixby said. “I think Mathilda Bagshot and Louis and Singleton might have wondered at that, too.”

“That’s who I was working with, on the case, at the time,” Bixby said, in answer to Morse’s questioning look.

“But why were you there at all?” Morse asked. “What was your connection? An accidental leak is a concern for a nuclear regulatory commission, surely. Not grounds for a multinational investigation.”

“It would be,” Bixby said. “If it was being investigated as a mere accident.”

“You mean … you had cause to think someone had done such a thing _deliberately?”_

“Not deliberately, per se, no. We were called in— because, while our botanist friend, Mr. Laxman was concerned with the effects of the accident, we were concerned with the cause.”

“The cause?” Morse asked.

“Why it happened in the first place. It shouldn’t have. Under normal circumstances, an alarm should have alerted the engineers right away, the faulty turbine immediately shut off.” 

Bixby shrugged, continuing on.

“Perhaps someone simply wasn’t paying attention …. Or perhaps someone had temporarily taken the safety and security protocols down, so that they might more easily pursue their own, hidden agenda.”

“Why?” Morse asked. “So they could … what, exactly? Access information? Make copies of data without leaving any trace of their actions in the system?”

“That was the theory,” Bixby said.

Morse looked into the fire for a moment, mulling that over.

“But why…” he asked, then, “Why were you there? Specifically?”

“Ah,” Bixby said. “Well, it was Special Branch’s investigation. I was only called in on auxiliary, because of Professor Haynes.”

“Who’s Professor Haynes?” 

“He taught at Stanford for years before returning to Oxford, to form part of the team working on the design of the power station. He recruited quite a few of his former students to come and work here. There’s quite a contingent of them, up at Bramford, U.S. engineers.”

“So…. you were there because you didn’t know who you might need to take into custody,” Morse ventured. “In case … it was someone who needed to be .... extradited?” 

“Do you know how many people work at the plant?” Bixby asked. 

“Seven hundred and five potential eyewitnesses,” Morse answered promptly. “And all of them unquestioned.”

“They didn’t _all_ go unquestioned,” Bixby said, a bit defensively. “We did make some headway, before the investigation was called off.”

“Well, they’ve all gone unquestioned by County, in regards to the Laxman case.”

Bixby grimaced as if to concede the point. 

“Why was it called off, then?” Morse asked. “The investigation?”

“I don’t know, old man. I was taken off the case in the earliest stages. Told to turn everything over and come home.” 

“Why?” 

“Well, in two words, Kim Philby.”

“Kim Philby? Who is that?” 

“He was a British intelligence officer. Cambridge man. Started working for the MI6 during the war, and, in ’49, was appointed first secretary to the British embassy in Washington, where he was the chief liaison with American intelligence agencies. Soon after I was assigned the case Bramford, it was discovered that he was a double agent, a member of a spy ring that had been passing information to the Soviets for decades, as far back as the war. Things got a little chilly—he had been Britain’s top man in D.C., after all—and all joint efforts were called into review.”

“Including the one at Bramford,” Morse said.

“Including the one at Bramford,” Bixby confirmed. “So I was called home.”

“To whom did you hand over your files, before you left?”  
  


“Louis and Singleton. I had hoped it would be Mathilda, but…..” 

“And what happened, then?”

“For a long time, I never knew. Then, just a few years ago, when I ran into Louis and Singleton again, during an investigation at certain perfume factory, I had the chance to catch up with them. They told me that they had been called off the case, too, just a few weeks later … Told that to _pursue further inquiries into the possible security breach was not in the national interest.”_

“Why?” Morse asked.

“They didn’t know why,” Bixby replied with a rueful laugh. “That was rather the point.”

Morse scowled. 

This all would have happened just months before Laxman’s disappearance, then, a case so bungled by County as to almost be….

As to almost be _deliberate …._

“Something doesn’t add up, does it?” Bixby asked. “Especially now, considering Ellsworth’s death has been handled in much the same manner?” He shook his head, then, his disdain clear in the contours of his face. “They’ve no imagination whatsoever. If you’re going to lie, at the very least come up with a story with some style.”

“You don’t believe it was a heart attack,” Morse said.

Bixby snorted.

“Do you?”

Morse said nothing….

And then….

Thursday hadn’t been willing to entertain his theory…

But might Bixby?

“I was thinking…” Morse began. “Are we _sure_ someone at the plant did for Laxman?”

Bixby frowned and learned back, clasping his hands around one bent knee, his expression somewhat doubtful, but, at the same time, clearly willing to hear him out.

And so Morse told him about his day in Bramford, about the Morris dancers, and of how the woods were diffused with an eerie green light, and of the trees fallen and bent like skeletal sevens—even though Bixby looked perplexed at that for a moment, before Morse caught himself and hurried on. 

He told him of Mrs. Chattox’s strange cottage, of the silver and shell wind chimes, and of the rumors in the village that Matthew Laxman was a surveyor ... and all the while, Bixby said nothing, only listened with solemn eyes.

Until Morse said, “When I was at Mrs. Chattox’s cottage, she gave me a Tarot card reading.” 

Bixby burst out with laughter at that, a sound that caught Morse quite by surprise, that rang warmly through the surrounding trees with a resounding echo that was perhaps much louder than what was prudent.

“Did she tell you you’d meet a tall, dark stranger, from across the sea?”

“She ….”

And here, Morse faltered, and frowned, because....

“She …. she _did,_ actually.”

Bixby laughed again, seemingly delighted, but Morse ignored him, continuing on.

“The point is … she made it a point to tell me about how the suits of the cards correspond to the four elements: earth, water, air, fire. Laxman’s glasses were uncovered at an archeological dig. Someone had buried them. Most likely, his body is out there somewhere in Bramford Mere, buried as well. And now Dr. Ellsworth has drowned, apparently, after suffering a ‘heart attack.’”

“Earth and water,” Bixby said, musingly.

“What if it was someone from the _village_ who killed Laxman, thinking he was a surveyor? What if the same person did for Ellsworth, trying to stop the new system being developed at Lovelace College from being implemented? Someone who doesn’t trust the idea of handing over their farm’s water supply to a computer system that lost a chess match?”

“Laxman and Ellsworth’s deaths both completely unrelated to the security breach, then?” Bixby asked. “Seems unlikely, doesn’t it? Ockham’s razor, after all, old man. Not to mention that .... well ....”

“Well, what?“ Morse asked.

“Well... that all sounds rather baroque, doesn’t it?”

“Hmmmm,” Morse said, “Perhaps so. Perhaps it’s an elaborate ruse. Perhaps it _was_ someone from the plant, after all, trying to make it _look_ as though the culprit were someone from the village, using their sort of signature. Or perhaps the deaths are unrelated, and someone is trying to throw dust in the the air, making the second look as if it shares a connection to the first.”

“Ah,” Bixby said, raising his eyebrows. “Wonderful. Even more so.”

Morse cast him a dark look, waiting for Bixby to make some further jibe, as Thursday had done, but it never came. Instead, he had returned to staring thoughtfully into the fire. 

And then, Morse realized that the fact that Bixby was at all interested in the cases and their possible connections raised an even larger question.

“If Special Branch wanted the investigation closed,” Morse asked. “Why are you here?” 

Bixby turned and looked back up at him, a fond smile breaking over his face, reaching all the way to the lights reflected in his eyes.

“I might well ask you the same question.”

“What’s that?” Morse asked.

“If Division wants the investigation closed, why are you here?”

The implication hit Morse like a thunderbolt, and immediately, he swiveled his head about, looking into the depths of the woods, as if, even now, there might be someone out there, in the darkness, hidden just behind the trees, just as he himself had been earlier that evening, straining to overhear their every word.

Then he lowered his voice to a whisper.

“Are you saying… you’ve gone _rogue?”_

Bixby made an expression of distaste.

“That’s a rather melodramatic way of putting it, isn’t it?” he said.

“Well, how would you put it?”

“Well, how would _you_ put it?” Bixby countered. 

“I want to get to the truth.”

“Why?”

And there it was, his own refrain shot back at him.

He didn’t know why.

And, of course, he did.

His whole life had once been a lie. _He_ had been a lie. That man’s unwitting and hidden assistant. The _M_ in _ARMADA_ , a pact he had never known he had joined. He had been there all along …. and no one thought to….

“It isn’t that I believe their intentions are necessarily purposefully nefarious,” Bixby interjected, almost swooping in, and Morse was left with the inexplicable feeling that Bixby had suddenly understood, that he had intervened in order to spare Morse from saying it.

“Just,” he concluded, “Shall we say … short-sighted.”

“They’ve bought the peace,” Morse conceded.

“But if there is someone out there who has murdered twice, who’s unstable, or two separate killers, both still at large …” Bixby began...

“Then at what cost?” Morse concluded. 

For a moment, they fell into silence, the only sound in the surrounding darkness the steady crackling of the fire, the gentle lapping of the water on the shore. 

“It’s our duty, isn’t it?” Morse asked, at last. “Whatever their intentions. A disappearance, a heart attack. What if these aren’t accidents? What if it’s murder? And if it is, who will be next?”

And, as Morse looked into Bixby’s eyes, he felt it: it was as if they’d sealed a wordless agreement between them. 

They were on two separate trails, working on the outside of the respective jurisdictions— but, whatever the truth was—whether their paths would converge or swerve apart— they were both of one mind, both looking for answers in the same places, both looking into the same hastily covered-up incidents. 

Incidents that began with a mishap at a power station and led all the way to a death at a chess tournament, five years later. 

Morse took a deep breath and then exhaled sharply through his nose. He did not know where his path would lead, but he felt as if he had finally stopped hovering about on the threshold of it, resolved, one way or the other, to start his journey down it, just as Mrs. Chattox had said. 

“I’ve got only one other question,” Morse said, at last. 

“Only one other?” Bix asked. “What’s that?”

“How did you steal the horse and then get it back without the owner noticing?”

Once again, Bixby broke out into unexpected laughter. Then, his whole face seemed to contort, so that he shifted the set of his jaw forward, and, when he spoke, it was in a completely different voice, a bit shrill, with a broader accent.

“Who says a horse was ever missing, lad?” he asked. 

_“You_ called it in?” Morse cried. “Knowing I’d be sent out there on some wild goose chase?”

Bixby smiled, looking quite pleased with himself.

“You could be fined for that,” Morse said. “Putting in a false call for help to the police.”

“Ah,” Bixby said. “But it wasn’t a false call for help, was it, old man?

He looked at him, then, with the same steady and fond bemusement, as if he held all that Morse was in the depths of his eyes.

It was a rare experience in Morse’s life, feeling so thoroughly understood. Not simply tolerated or indulged, but actually seen for who he was. It seemed to thrum through him like a warmth, like its own sort of happiness. 

“God, I’ve missed you,” Bixby said.

Morse quirked a smile.

And perhaps...

Perhaps it was possible that Bixby felt it, too. 

Morse leaned back then, stretching his legs out before him, bracing his weight on his hands as he looked up into the darkened skies, just as a shooting star descended down and down before disappearing in the tops of the trees. He watched its decent and and slowly murmured .. .

_Stars, I have seen them fall,_

_but when they drop and die_

_No star is lost at all_

_From the star-sown sky._

_The toil of all that be_

_Helps not the primal fault_

_It rains into the sea_

_And still the sea is salt._

“That’s awfully…” Bixby began, a quizzical expression on his face. “That’s awfully gloomy, isn’t it?”

“It’s the way of the world.”

“Is it?”

“Hmmmm,” Morse said. 

“Well. I don’t think so,” Bixby replied. “If a star were to fall, I’d notice.”

“No,” Morse said. “No, you wouldn’t. A shooting star is really nothing but a meteor. After one falls, the sky is still the same.”

Bixby turned towards him once more, then, so that he was looking him full in the face. 

“I’d notice,” he said. 

His voice had dropped suddenly, into a new and low huskiness, as if the words were charged with some other meaning.

Morse found, for once, that he wasn’t sure what to say; for a long while, he simply sat there, looking into eyes that had grown soft and meditative, until Bixby reached out, bringing up a warm hand to cup his face, which had grown chilled despite the nearby fire, so that Morse felt himself go still with the shock of the contrast of it, as if the night had gone strangely airless.

Bixby slid his palm downwards, stroking along his cheek, and, for a moment, Morse thought he might trace his lips with the ends of his fingers, but instead, he stopped mid-way and brushed his fingertips lightly over the bridge of his nose, as if contemplating the scatter of summer freckles there.

And then he smiled, gently. Perhaps Bixby, too, had noticed, then, that he was not quite the same person as the ghost who had once stood in this very spot, turning reams of white paper to ashes, years ago.

“And why should the sea still be salt,” Bixby asked, “once it’s met with a blaze of light?”

“It’s always salt,” Morse said. 

“Is it, Morse?” he queried, striking again that low timber, an odd caress sounding in his voice, as if he were saying something quite different.

And still, Bixby was looking steadily into his eyes, and then his eyes dropped to his lips.

“I would that that weren’t so,” he said.

Suddenly, everything seemed to happen as if he were outside himself, as if the Morse of two years ago really was there, dropping papers into the fire, sending up torrents of sparks, while, all the while, another self sat nearer the shore, numb and breathless, as Bixby’s face drew closer and closer, slowly, leaning in, while Morse’s heart sped up, anticipating a moment of impact .... that never came….

Because Bixby had drawn to a stop, his heavy gaze moving back from his lips up to his eyes, and Morse realized that he was asking permission, waiting to see if he might meet him halfway.

Morse shut his eyes and leaned in blindly, hoping that that was enough to quell Bixby’s hesitation, and in the next minute, Bix’s warm mouth pressed up softly against his, and then shifted, pulling lightly at his bottom lip in a way that sent a jolt through him like a tremble of electricity. The scent of leaves and the smoke, the warm exploring mouth on his, the hand that ran up, trailing though the waves of his hair, all seemed to go to his head in a dizzying rush, and Morse opened his mouth further, deepening the kiss, a kiss that seemed full of connections, of the connections between them, and all the connections in his head, that lit up like a grid, like JCN’s blinking lights, flaring off, popping and crackling with the dance of the fire. He raised his hand to Bixby’s jaw, to trace along its lines, and suddenly, some sense feeling in his fingers faltered, surprised by edges broader than he had expected, and... 

And…

What was he doing?

Morse jumped up, then, brushing the leaves from off his trousers.

“I …” he began. “I had better go.”

“Ah,” Bixby said.

“The case. And. I have to get the squad car back… ”

“It’s all right,” Bixby said. Then he quirked a smile. “I’ll see you at the party, I suppose.” 

“The party?” Morse asked, uncertainly.

“The reception. For the Soviets. You’ll still be representing the city of Oxford, I suppose.”

Suddenly, Morse remembered Dempsey saying something of the sort, that the “reception would be going on as planned.”

He just had not imagined it would have anything to do with him, at the time.

_“You’re_ hosting the reception? Why?” 

“I’m helping out a friend.” 

“A friend?” Morse asked. “What friend?”

“My neighbor. Anthony Donn. We’ll all be putting our best foot forward. Tony’s house is quaint and charming in its own tweedy and genteel sort of way. But, you know. All his father’s rifles on the wall and those stodgy coats of arms. His mother’s endless sets of china. We wanted a little free world glitz, a little pizzazz. So he asked me if I would play the host. I’ve engaged the Wildwood, for the evening. 

“The _Wildwood?”_

“Of course. The Soviets love rock-n-roll. Mad about the stuff. You’ll love it, old man. You’ll see.”

Morse’s heart fell.

Somehow, he rather doubted it.

He had never felt at ease at any sort of party, really.

Let alone one that would have both Tony and Bixby in attendance.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which Fancy and Morse go for a Tarot card reading....

Morse rolled over, searching for a cooler spot on the pillow.

He was dead tired after another late night at the lake house, but still, he simply could not drop off to sleep.

He just couldn’t stop thinking about the two of them.

What had Louis and Singleton meant when they had said that he shouldn’t “muddle his priorities?” That he should “forget all about this Laxman business?”

At the television studios, they had seemed troubled when he had told them that he was following up on the five-year-old cold case, and now that Morse had spoken to Bixby, he was beginning to understand why.

Louis and Singleton knew all about the Laxman case, didn’t they? Had indeed been pursuing an inquiry of their own out at Bramford at about the same time, looking into an alleged mishap at the power station. An inquiry which had subsequently, and with little ceremony, it seemed, been shut down.

Had Louis and Singleton thought that Laxman’s disappearance and the leak at the power plant might be connected? Did they not want him getting involved … because they planned to look further into it themselves?

Was that why Special Branch had sent Dempsey out to Lovelace College? Could it be that Louis and Singleton, like Bixby, were disgruntled by how the Bramford case had been handled? Had they, perhaps, made their unhappiness known and were now being kept well clear of anything to do with the power station, lest they be tempted to stick their noses in?

Or, perhaps, Dempsey had been sent out to intercept Morse because those at headquarters knew that Morse had worked with Louis and Singleton before, knew that their warnings might not be sufficient to scare him off.

Dempsey had been rather more intimidating than his old friends Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Morse had to admit that.

Even though, he thought with satisfaction, as he punched his pillow into a more comfortable shape, that certainly hadn’t stopped him from searching Dr. Ellsworth’s office and finding that poem.

He kicked the blankets off, fretfully, then, and rolled over to his other side.

Not that Bixby thought much of it.

The worst of it all was: how had he neglected to tell Bixby about what Professor Gredenko had said to him by the lily pond, after the chess tournament, about the enigmatic telephone conversation he had overheard?

_“Meet me in the garden for tea.”_

Although perhaps Bixby would have simply laughed at that as well, just as he had dismissed the poem.

Morse could just imagine it, now.

_“Oh, dear. Sounds like someone’s planning to have tea, old man. We’d better get right on it.”_

Morse rolled over again, so that he was lying on his back, and threw his arm up over his head.

Whatever Bixby might say, Morse was certain the poem must mean _something._

_“Never again would birdsong be the same.”_

And it was never the same, was it, when you lost someone who you loved? After Susan, he had gone into a tailspin, really.

One in which, you could almost say, he was still trying to straighten the wheel, struggling to come out of.

Who had Dr. Ellsworth lost, that he would keep such a poem?

It was sad, really, to think the old professor felt as if he had to keep it hidden away like that, crammed into the pages of an academic tome as if it were some sort of dirty secret, as if the fact that he had once been in love was something he had to deny to the world.

Did he pull the page out at odd hours, mulling over the lines?

Whatever it was all about, it must have been buried awfully deep in Ellsworth’s past. Wherever Morse had inquired about it, he had been met with a dead end.

“He lived for his work.”

“He had no personal life.”

Doubtless, if Morse could find a way to search the professor’s house, he would find it every bit as dreary as Ronald Beavis’ flat, as sodden with despondency as the water-stains on Beavis’ gold wallpaper.

Oh, there might be signs of some few, small indulgences—records, or crosswords, or books or Scotch, desperate oases in the desert of his days, of the daily round of work and home, with no spark of life, or of love, in between.

Morse turned over again, so that he was staring at the far wall, musing to himself as his eyes began to trace the path of a twisting vine painted there, its deep green muted to deep blue in the moonlit darkness, its flowing lines leading up and up until it was intertwining with a curved branch of a tree and then dropping down to where a bird was spiraling in midflight, falling in a flash of dusky indigo.

And then, Morse’s eyes were growing heavier and heavier … the dream images on his walls replaced by ones behind his eyes, images that looked like fantastic cards placed before him, one by one…

_A disembodied hand coming out of a great cloud, holding onto a staff springing with new green leaves .... as if the old bit of wood held within it a second life..._

And it seemed to him, as he was slowly sinking into the pillow, hovering at that point between wakefulness and sleep, that in those cards he might find answers.

Not from the cards, of course.

But from himself.

Because that was the trick of the cards, wasn’t it?

We looked at the images, we dwelled on the symbols, and then we wrought our own meanings there, letting the cards tell us what we already know. And then the fortune teller collects his fee.

Perhaps, if Morse were to go back out to Bramford, out to Mrs. Chattox’s lonely cottage hidden away in the green light of the woods, he might uncover something more about Laxman.

Mrs. Chattox was strange enough, to be certain, but she was far more forthcoming than any of the other residents there, so many of whom had unceremoniously shut the door right in his face.

_A knight on a white horse, holding a sword aloft…._

What had that all been about? The Knight of Swords? An impulsive man who would step in and change his fate…?

_“Don’t tell me. I’ll meet a tall, dark handsome stranger from across the water, who will irrevocably change my fate.”_

And he had.... 

Hadn’t he? 

And the tower struck down… now that Morse thought about it, the image on the card bore a definite resemblance to one the twin white cooling towers of the Bramford Power Station… but he hadn’t listened …. he had simply said… “and tomorrow, for Capricorns, will be Saturday...”

Morse yawned and then scowled softly to himself.

It was all balderdash, really.

But perhaps, it might be worth it, to go out to Mrs. Chattox’s cottage, on another inquiry.

And while he was there, he might as well ask for another reading….

He would sit and look at the cards laid out one by one before him, and—as he considered the images there—he would bring his own interpretations to bear upon them; they might help him to see some new pattern, some fresh, new way of looking at things—to take all of the disparate thoughts tumbling through his mind and lay them straight in a row before him, to help him to see what he already knew, what was already there in his heart…

About the case, of course.

***

“Where are you going?” Fancy asked, as Morse took his car coat from off the nearby hook, right at the double glass-paneled doors of the nick.

“Nowhere,” Morse said.

“Can I come along? It’s as dull as paint around here lately.”

“No.”

“Hey,” Fancy protested.

Morse turned around and looked at the young DC down the length of his nose, trying to make himself as forbidding as possible.

“What?” he asked shortly.

“You’re up to something,” Fancy said.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

“You used to trust me, back when we were PCs.”

“I trust you.”

“I mean you used to trust me even with this sort of thing.”

“What sort of thing?” Morse asked.

Fancy shrugged. “Dr. Ellsworth’s death gets dismissed as a ‘heart attack.’ Special Branch swoops in and cleans up. Next thing you know, you’re checking out squad cars, slipping off, who-knows-where, even though there isn’t anything much in.”

“Who said I checked out a car?” Morse asked.

Fancy shrugged.

“Have you told anyone?”

“Of course not. I said you could trust me, didn’t I?”

Morse exhaled a breath that he hadn’t realized he had been holding in one long swoosh. Then he scrubbed up the waves at the back of his nape, considering, his eyes trained on a missing corner of a tile on the linoleum floor.

It was true what Fancy had said. Even during the Gull case, when all of Division had been after him, hell-bent on pegging him as some sort of lunatic, Fancy had not given him away, even when he had found him hiding under a bed at Bixby’s house on Lake Silence.

Morse had wanted a fresh and new perspective.

And Fancy was, if nothing else, fresh and new.

“If you must know,” Morse said, “I’m going to get a Tarot card reading.”

Predictably, Fancy looked delighted at the idea.

“You are?”

“Yes. At Bramford.”

Fancy’s eyes widened at that.

“Oooooooh,” he said, nodding. He winked, then, a little more dramatically than what was necessary. 

And from that, one gathered, Fancy had cottoned on.

“There’s an old woman there, who lives in a cottage in the woods. She was a little more inclined to talk than the others there,” Morse explained.

“Standoffish lot, are they?”

Morse grimaced, remembering the strange village, the straw figures, the horse-headed masks, the pounding of the staffs as the Morris dancers practiced their figures in a monotonous, droning round.

Thump-thump-THUMP. Thump-thump-THUMP.

The door after door after door slammed summarily in his face.

“You’ve no idea.”

Then, Morse shrugged.

“It seems she met Laxman before, Mrs. Chattox. And she says offers answers, so….”

“So you’re hoping maybe she’ll offer some new detail, something that might give us a new lead?”

Diplomatically, Morse chose to ignore Fancy’s use of the plural pronoun.

“I’ve got no other ideas,” Morse admitted.

Fancy nodded. And Morse found he didn’t regret telling him of his plan, after all. 

Fancy was perhaps the one person to whom he could tell such a thing who wouldn’t question his judgment, who wouldn’t discourage him from his goal. Thursday, Jakes—even Strange and Trewlove—might have told him the idea was at best a long-shot, at worst, utterly ridiculous.

Which should have told him something, he supposed.

And it did.

It was sad how many people exhibited such a woeful lack of perseverance, wasn’t it?

***

“Meet me in the garden for tea?” Fancy asked.

“Mmmmmm,” Morse said.

“Maybe it’s some sort of code,” Fancy said.

Morse didn’t dignify that with a response, but rather kept on, stepping over uneven roots and fallen limbs, striding along through the woods with Fancy bobbing along in his wake.

“And what do you make of that poem?” Fancy asked. “Kinda sad, isn’t it?”

Morse didn’t bother to form a reply to that, either.

It wasn’t as if he expected an exegesis from Fancy, but he had hoped for rather more than that obvious observation.

“Are we almost there?” Fancy asked.

Morse gritted his teeth. Already he was regretting it, bringing Fancy along.

It was difficult to believe that, back when they were PCs, he had been forced to operate day in and day out in Fancy’s company.

Fancy was far more willing to suspend his disbelief than Thursday, it was true—was even more open to Morse’s ideas than Bixby.

Trouble was, his mind was a little _too_ open.

So open that anything in his head fell right out of it.

But it was only to be expected, that Fancy’s presence might wear on his nerves. Morse was accustomed, now, to working alone.

Although, as they headed deeper into the woods—to where the trees grew ever more ancient, to where trunks and limbs lay half-fallen, growing by tilts and slants and twists as if in a struggle to reach after the eerie green light that filtered its way through the cover of leaves, there was a part of Morse that was grateful to have his company.

It was a fanciful idea, Morse knew, but there was something primeval about the woods here, something sentient, something.... not quite benign, as if the trees were tracing his steps, watching his movements...

Perhaps it was the fortress-like feel of the place that left Morse with that odd prickle at his nape—this was no crisp and pleasant wood, but rather a confusion of trees, all collapsing and turning at odd angles, so that Morse felt almost as if he was wading through a leafy sea of skeletal sevens... sevens that reached for him with wizened hands.

Morse winced now at the memory, of how that detail had come spilling out when he had spoken of this forest to Bixby, of how he had told Bix that the trees here stood bent like skeletal sevens …

And why the hell had he told him that, of all things?

Morse could still remember it, that first day at the nick, when he had been brought in to give a statement: the horrified look on Thursday and Mr. Bright’s faces, when those words had come tumbling out, as if he had revealed something else there, in such an odd phobia.

Morse took a steadying breath, looking up into the trees as he walked, up to where the boughs were drifting in a gentle wind, up to where the light shone more golden than green, with a soft touch of an autumnal glow.

Well. He could only hope that Bixby hadn’t made too much of it.

He must have been overtired, to have said such a thing, that was all.

Trouble was, his head was just like this chaos of a wood, full of too many thoughts growing after the sun in all directions. What he needed was some way to organize them all, to make sense of the jumbled phrases in his notebook, to narrow down what ....

And then, the toe of his shoe caught on something unyielding, unforgiving, and, in the next moment, he was flying. 

He threw his hands out before him to catch his fall as he landed hard on the forest floor, sprawled out amongst the twigs and scatter of leaves. For a moment, he simply lay there, stunned by the suddenness with which he had found himself on the ground.

“Are you all right?” Fancy asked.

Quickly, Morse scrambled up, leaping to his feet and then brushing off his shirt with brisk efficiency.

“I’m fine,” he said.

And then he picked up the coat he had been carrying and continued on as if nothing had happened, ignoring the searing pain across the front of his shin and the stinging in his palms, keen to regain his dignity.

Fancy said nothing more about it, at least; Morse had to give him that much.

He could just imagine if Jakes was here, what grief he’d give him about it.

_“If you’d get your head out of the clouds, you might see what’s right under your feet, Morse.”_

“Blimey,” Fancy breathed.

Morse looked up from where he had been carefully watching the progress of his feet, and followed Fancy’s gaze.

They had come near the end of the tunnel of the wood; ahead, a clearing unfolded before them, where, through a frame of leaves and waving branches, lay the rusted gate, the ramshackle cabin, its porch glittering with wind chimes that caught the light like mirrors, as if beckoning them on.

Fancy went to quicken his pace, clearly intrigued by the odd little cottage, but Morse put out an arm, restraining him.

“You want to go careful,” Morse told him. “She’s armed.”

 _“What?”_ Fancy blurted, as if in wonder as to what sort of place Morse had brought him to.

But Morse ignored him and continued on, passing through the screeching gate and striding up the path to the over-spanned porch steps that moved like the ocean under his feet.

“Mrs. Chattox?” Morse called. “It’s Detective Constable Morse. Oxford City Police.”

At once, the old woman came out onto the porch, a tasseled shawl wrapped around her thin shoulders.

“Running a bit late, aren’t you? I expected you five minutes ago.”

Morse scowled. Playing the showwoman already, was she?

Perhaps this really was, after all, just another wasted journey.

“Ah, well,” she said. “I suspect you fell over a root, and that’s what delayed you.”

Morse widened his eyes, then, in alarm.

Because....

“Oh, it’s not as astonishing as all that,” she assured him, and then she jerked her chin pointedly, towards his left shin. Morse looked down, following the gesture, and saw that the fabric of his black trousers had been torn, doubtless by some broken piece of an upturned limb.

Little wonder his shin should be smarting so, then.

He shook his leg, absentmindedly, as if to shake off the sting, and then looked back up to where Mrs. Chattox was standing, her arms folded.

“I suppose you’ll be wanting a reading, then.”

Morse hesitated. He wasn’t sure how he felt about it, now that he was here. He didn’t like the way she was looking at him, really, as if he were utterly transparent.

“Oh, you’d be surprised how many men of doubt find themselves retracing their steps out here, seeking answers from the cards.”

Then, she lifted her chin, as if resigned to get down to the matter at hand.

“So,” she asked. “Which of you has the question?”

“I do,” they replied in unison.

Morse rounded on Fancy, who only smiled sheepishly in return.

“Well,” Fancy said. “Wouldn’t hurt to get a little advice.”

Morse turned away and took a steading breath, exhaling audibly though his nose, trying to hold his patience.

And of course, he should have known. Fancy was not here to help with the case. He was only concerned with his own lovelorn little set of troubles.

He was here only to utterly waste his time.

“Morse can go first,” Fancy amended.

They went up the steps, then, following Mrs. Chattox into the oddly-lit house, in to where the sun streamed through the old warped windows, casting shadows as its beams—made visible in floating motes of dust—lit the macramé hangings that threaded before the thick glass panes like spider’s webs.

The old woman led them to a table draped with a burgundy velvet cloth spangled with gold symbols, where she took up a chair to sit, nodding for them to do likewise. Morse slung his car coat over the back of one chair, following suit, and slouched down into it, as Fancy claimed the seat beside him.

Mrs. Chattox reached into the large pocket of her cotton print dress, then, and pulled out a worn deck of cards, placing them smartly on the table before her.

“First, you must ask a question of the cards,” she announced.

Morse leaned forward in his seat.

“Will I find out what happened to Matthew Laxman?”

The old woman narrowed her eyes at that, looking displeased. “You asked that before.”

“Yes. Well. Now I’m asking again.”

“But you didn’t listen the first time. You only scoffed. Said, ‘And for Capricorns tomorrow will be Saturday.’ They’re not going to like that, your bothering them with that, when you were so dismissive the first time.” 

_“Who’s_ not going to like it?”

“The cards.”

Morse snorted.

“Do you like being asked the same question again and again?” Mrs. Chattox persisted. “Patient sort, are you?”

“No. He really isn’t,” Fancy said.

“I think it was meant to be a rhetorical question, George,” Morse said.

“Oh.”

Morse sighed, but the old woman’s expression did not change; it was clear she was brooking no argument.

“Fine. I’ll change it, then,” Morse said.

Then he pronounced, as if talking to the air around them, “Did anyone at the power station have anything to do with Laxman’s disappearance?’”

“Doubt it,” the old woman huffed, “since he was working for them. I can answer that one.”

Morse sighed again.

“Alright.”

Then, he sat up straighter in his chair.

“‘Will I find the answers I’m looking for?’ There. How is that?” 

Mrs. Chattox nodded in satisfaction, as if he had finally shown sense. She shuffled the cards and pulled the first one off of the top of the deck.

“The first card represents yourself.”

She placed the card down on the table before him, and Morse looked at the image there: on the card, a man was traipsing along with his head up, gazing at the sky— just as he himself had been doing just minutes before—except rather than tripping over an errant tree root, the man on the card was headed straight for the edge of a cliff.

Below the man’s feet, were written two words: “The Fool.”

Morse let out a cry of protest.

“Last time I was the Ace of Wands! You said it meant I was tenacious and driven in all of my endeavours!”

Fancy, beside him, broke off laughing. 

“It’s not a bad card,” Mrs. Chattox reassured him. “Ruled by Uranus, the Fool represents the soul’s journey, it stands for change.”

Morse leaned back in his chair, wearily running a hand through his slightly sweat-dampened hair. It served him right, he supposed.

Ask a foolish question, get a foolish answer.

A quirk of a rueful smile was playing at the corner of his mouth, but, as he looked down at the card again, from this new angle, something within him went cold, the smile fading from his face at once.

The card depicted a young man, striding along on his way, his head in the clouds as he walked amongst the rocks…

…. right towards his doom.

But suddenly, it seemed to Morse, that the man on the card might just as easily have been walking along the frozen pavement on a cold, white February morning, his mind full of a hundred things—of Susan and his father and of what awaited him in the Army—utterly preoccupied …... utterly unaware that someone might be just behind him….

“Behind you,” Mrs. Chattox said, laying down another card, “the Eight of Swords.”

And the plummet of cold that had drowned in his heart spread over him, spread though him in a dull, icy wash, so that he was almost light-headed with it.

On the card before him, a woman stood bound and blindfolded, surrounded by swords driven at odd angles into the ground all around her, so that the hilts of them seemed to form into the shape of sevens.

“Ah, dear,” Mrs. Chattox said mournfully, clucking her tongue. “The Eight of Swords.”

“What’s that mean?” Morse asked. His voice sounded oddly thin even to his own ears, but he found he was grateful, really, that he could speak at all.

Mrs. Chattox raised her pointed chin, lifting her face so that her milky blue eyes shone in the light of the fantastic window.

“The Eight of Swords suggests you’ve been hemmed in, held back by an ill-fate. Constrained, trapped by circumstance.”

Morse swallowed and leaned forward, folding his arms on the table, so that he might make a better study of the card.

“Well… what does that mean, then?” he asked uncertainly.

“It means some things in life lie beyond your control. So your best course of action lies within the one thing you can control.”

“And what’s that?”

“You,” she said simply.

She pointed one withered finger, tracing the outlines of the card.

“If you look closely, you’ll notice the bonds are no longer as tight as she imagines. If she could remove the blindfold, she would see that she could step out of the circle of swords.”

Morse swallowed.

But that was what he _had_ done, wasn’t it? On that night when he hadn’t heard them, the series of sounds he had heard so many times before that he had given up counting—those metallic clanks like hammer strikes, the turning of the latches…

It had seemed so long since he had dared to try it. Before, whenever he had attempted to flee, he had simply been dragged back, left in the small room until the sevens on the walls were looking at him greedily, left until he wished that that man would come back again, because even that man was better than no one at all….

But on that night, he had tried the door, and it was open. And when he had found the stairs, he thought … they must lead somewhere, mustn’t they? They must lead out….

And then there was a man in the moonlit window and shouts in the dark and a shatter of glass until all lay still, until _he_ lay still, in a pool of blood and a drift of papers…

“Morse?” Fancy asked uncertainly.

_“Shhhhh!”_ Morse hissed.

“Before you,” the old woman said, then, laying down another card, “The Two of Pentacles.”

For a moment, Morse simply sat there, breathless with disbelief, the warmth of the sun from the window falling reassuringly across his shoulders as a new realization flooded through him, overcoming the shock of the first.

It was all ridiculous, he was being ridiculous.

The card that lay before him was absolutely ridiculous.

What kind of a game was this, anyway?

Morse narrowed his eyes, taking in the image on the card: a man in sprightly boots and a ludicrous red hat something like a dunce cap dancing a jig, looking thoroughly stupid as he juggled two gold coins emblazoned with pentacles within an infinity loop.

Mrs. Chattox eyed him, a knowing smile on her face.

“A bit overcommitted, are you?” she asked.

“What?” Morse asked, dumbfounded.

“Got two on the go, then? My, my. Wouldn’t have thought you had it in you.”

_“What?”_

Fancy, beside him, joined in, snickering along with the old woman.

Quickly, Morse recovered himself. 

“Well …” he sputtered. “I’ve had a lot to be going on with. Several cases going on at once. The chess match, the stolen Romanov brooch, Laxman’s disappearance.”

“All that’s over now,” Fancy countered.

“Now, now,” Mrs. Chattox said. “It’s not a bad card, either. Read another way, it means you can take care of all the demands made of you. That you believe in yourself, even if no one else does. But forcing your way through difficulties is not going to work….”

Morse felt his heart sinking, as a third realization hit him.

His question had been too vague.

None of this was about the case at all.

It was all about himself.

About his past, about his present predicament that he couldn’t seem to muddle his way through, his confusion that seemed to send his thoughts spiraling like the painted birds on his bedroom wall.

Because he just couldn’t stop thinking about the two of them.

_Tony and Bixby. Bixby and Tony._

Or wait.

What was he saying?

“It” wasn’t _about_ anything at all.

 _He_ was the one reading his own meanings into this random assortment of cards, cards randomly shuffled and randomly laid.

“Sometimes,” Mrs. Chattox was saying, “the way forward is by a step to the side or backward.”

And, there they were.

Just the sort of vague nonsense that he might have expected.

“Hmmmmm. Not off a cliff, I suppose,” Morse said, slumping once more back into his chair. 

Mrs. Chattox ignored him, laying down the fourth card.

“And before you….. Ah, there he is again. The King of Swords.”

“It was the Knight of Swords the last time,” Morse corrected.

“You seem to remember quite a lot about it, for someone who professes not to believe in what the cards have to teach us,” she replied, arching one eyebrow.

Morse said nothing.

“It’s too much of a coincidence. It’s him again,” she said. “He’s come back, crowned.”

Morse sat up and leaned over the table, then, his curiosity piqued.

What did she mean _, crowned?_

Could it be Bixby or Tony? _Had_ he chosen one of them, in his heart, and hadn’t even realized it?

Morse mulled over the image on the card. The man depicted there sat on a high throne, holding a sword aloft. He was clear-eyed and imposing, his face full of a sharp and deeply-seated intelligence.

Not much like Tony or Bixby either, really.

Although perhaps that wasn’t altogether fair. Tony might seem superficial, affably charming in his light and airy upper-crust sort of way. But, the inverse of that was that he was utterly unflappable, an even keel in any crisis.

He hadn’t changed at all really, from the days in which Morse had first known him; it was as if his world had been arranged just as it had been for so long, that he couldn’t conceive of it being any other way. The sky could turn red, the earth open in a chasm at his feet, and Tony would go on, being the same warm and reliable Tony.

And then, as Morse sat there, musing over the card, he couldn’t help but to think of that morning at the lake house, of how it had felt to wake in its narrow bed, stretched out alongside of Tony—of how it had felt to sense the warmth there beside him, the uneven dip in the mattress that told of another’s weight, of the reassurance of another’s presence, before he had even opened his eyes.

To know that he was not alone.

It was as if there had been something there within him, something tightly-coiled, that was finally unwinding as he lay there, pressed up against the solidness of the wall and alongside of the angular frame of one of the few people in the world whom he could trust— someone he trusted, perhaps, more than he could ever dare to trust himself. 

But yet, if his heart was so set on Tony, what was was he doing, right back at the lake house, kissing someone else on the very next night?

Bixby wasn’t what you’d call reliable, not by a long shot, popping into his life and slipping out again as soon as a case was closed—although, it was true, he had generally been there, conveniently on the scene, whenever Morse needed him.

But there was something else there, some shared restlessness, some understanding, some connection that Morse could not quite explain. 

Or, maybe, he could.

Bixby knew what it was to want to know.

To _need_ to know, to need to pull at that thread, even if it might mean your own unravelling.

_And Morse opened his mouth further, deepening the kiss, a kiss that seemed full of connections, of all the connections between them, of all the connections in his head that lit up like a grid, like JCN’s blinking lights, flaring off, popping and crackling with the dance of the flame before them...._

“The King of Swords in this placement represents someone who will help you along on your path, someone to help you in your future,” Mrs. Chattox said. “He is rational, logical, and a deep thinker.”

Morse snorted.

No.

It didn’t sound like either of them, really.

“He can be cynical or stern. He can be a bit of a bully, but generally, he’s fair-minded. Someone who takes his responsibilities seriously.”

And those final two words cinched it. Neither of them seemed to take anything seriously.

Nevertheless, Morse found himself leaning further and further over the table, leaning heavily on his folded arms, pulled in somehow by the face on the card, willing it to reveal its secrets.

 _Could_ it be Bix or Tony? 

Had he been underestimating either one or the other of them?

Would one of them surprise him at the last hour? 

He simply couldn’t tell which of them the card was meant to be ....

And, moreover, he wasn’t quite sure if he _wanted_ it to be either one of them.

There was something in the king’s eyes that was a little _too_ cool, a little _too_ imposing, something in the set of his jaw a little too determined. It was the face of someone he could respect, he supposed, but it didn’t seem at all the sort of person he might fall in love with.

The imperious man on his throne hadn’t a trace of Susan or Tony or Bixby’s easy smile, for one thing— hadn’t the slightest glimmer of that effortless way of smoothing over his awkward edges, of that casual, cordial quality that had drawn him to each of them at one time in his life or another …

“And the heart of the matter, the Three of Wands, inverted,” Mrs. Chattox said, then, laying down a final card.

"Well,” she added, sadly, shaking her head. “Of course, there’d be an impediment.”

Well, of course, there was that.

And, perhaps Thursday was right.

What could ever come of it?

It would always be there, that surge of anxiety, the worry of who might know. 

Perhaps it really wasn’t much of a coincidence that he should have ended up at the lake house with both Bixby and Tony—it was, after all, an abandoned, lost little place, a place that stood alone, as if in another dream of a world.

The only world for them, really. 

For where could he ever find a place with either of them in this one?

“You shouldn’t worry so much,” Mrs. Chattox was saying. “I’ve had another poor soul coming by here. Like you, he isn’t much inclined to be a believer in the cards, a believer in his fate. But his trouble’s far worse than yours—he faces a division that’s almost impossible to surmount. But I told him, ‘when it comes to love, all things are possible.’”

Morse looked up sharply at that, his mind jumping track in an instant, right back onto the case.

This was just the sort of detail he had been hoping for.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “Who else has been here?”

“A man of science and logic. Like I said, even less inclined to trust to his fate than you are.”

“Did _Laxman_ ever come for a reading?” Morse asked.

She cast him a dark look, clearly annoyed.

“I said a man of science. Not a so-called man of science.”

“Oh,” Morse said. “Right.”

He fell back into the wooden chair, running a hand once more through his hair, but his mind was spinning into overdrive ...

Who would have had need to come all the way out here to Bramford…?

Some star-crossed lover, obviously, seeking advice, but, beyond that. ...

What would have brought him to Bramford in the first place?

Perhaps someone involved in the JCN project, to have been brought out this way, to this obscure corner of the world?

_Never again would birdsong be the same._

“It wasn’t an older man, was it?” Morse asked. “With a .....”

“No,” she said. “I wouldn’t say so.” 

And, oh hell. 

“It wasn’t a Thomas Maxwell, was it?” Morse asked. 

“I can’t betray a confidence,” Mrs. Chattox said, primly.

Morse scowled.

“But… you told him, this man, that when it comes to love, all things are possible?”

“Yes,” she said. “I did.”

Morse rubbed his eyes, wearily.

A division, was it, sundering their love? 

An impediment to be overcome?

Like the iron curtain, perhaps? 

If either Yulia Vaganova or Thomas Maxwell were planning ever to defect, he’d rather it not be on his watch. The case was complicated enough to be going on with, and the last thing he needed was the two of them getting in the way of the larger picture.

“The knowledge the cards give is for all who seek it," Mrs. Chattox said, as if sensing his annoyance. “I don’t hoard it for myself.”

“Hmmmm,” Morse said.

_Knowledge?_

But she hadn’t _told_ him anything.

Not about the case and not about .... 

But then, the cards could only tell you what you already knew.

You read your meaning there, not the other way around.

Which meant... 

Morse sat back up again, looking at the fourth card as though he might take it by surprise, and— in so doing—find if he saw something of either Tony or Bixby revealed there. 

Morse wasn’t sure if he loved Tony in the way that he ought, but the thought of giving him up left him with an almost unbearable ache, a gaping depth of loneliness. A world without Tony was a world without the sun, a world filled with only a green and eerie light of an ancient wood. 

But then again, as he had sat beside Bixby, talking over the case, he couldn’t help but feel it, that surge of adrenaline, that sense of connection that he had so rarely ever known, as if the two of them were two sides of the same gold gambling chip that Bix might toss into the air.

“So do you think that’s him?” Fancy asked.

“Who?” Morse asked.

_Tony or Bixby? Bixby or Tony?_

“Matthew Laxman,” Fancy said.

“Who?”

It took Morse a moment, then, to make sense of the incredulous look on Fancy’s face—to realize he was looking at him as if he had been too long out in the sun.

Mrs. Chattox smiled, as satisfied as a cat, as if she had seen right through him all the way from the Two of Pentacles.

Or even all the way from The Fool. 

“Oh,” Morse said. “No. No, I don’t. I don’t know … I don’t know who it is.”

“So, young man,” Mrs. Chattox said, turning abruptly to Fancy. “What’s your question?”

“Will I find the answers I’m looking for?” Fancy said.

Morse rolled his eyes. It was his own question verbatim.

The old woman scooped up the cards in Morse’s line, and then, he was gone, swept up, the King of Swords, leaving Morse none the wiser.

She shuffled the cards again, and then laid the first one on the table.

“The first card represents yourself,” she said, while beside him, Fancy gasped aloud.

On the card before them was an image of a man face down on the ground, with ten swords driven hard into his back.

Morse buried his face in one hand.

If Mrs. Chattox _had_ to bewitch someone with a prophecy of gloom and doom, need she choose someone as impressionable as Fancy?

Somehow, Morse had the feeling that the walk back to the squad car would be a very long one indeed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poor Fancy! Although it might be for the best, a warning, in the end!?!
> 
> As I always, I would love to know what you think! :0)
> 
> Thanks for reading! <3


	14. Chapter 14

Morse crashed through the woods, batting at the overhanging branches that blocked his path, pushing away with impatience the cool brush of sweet-scented leaves that swept soft and fluttering against the palm of his hand.

“Would you just _stop?”_ he snapped.

Fancy, following along behind him, grabbed at a branch that had swung back into his face and shoved it aside.

“Easy for you to say,” he said.

“George,” Morse said. “Please. Be sensible. Such predictions of gloom and doom .… they’re the oldest trick in the book. Any charlatan’s bread and butter.”

“How do you reckon that?”

“Well, you’re worried, aren’t you? And so, you’ll be back, wanting more details. A fool and his money are soon parted.”

“You were the one who got The Fool,” Fancy muttered, mutinously.

Morse drew to a halt and turned around so quickly that Fancy all but stumbled into him. 

“Are you quite finished?”

And then, Fancy’s shoulders slumped as he seemed to crumple under Morse’s stern gaze.

“All right,” he conceded. “All right. I suppose I’m just being stupid.”

Well. 

Fancy had said it. 

Morse turned around and continued on through the light and leaf-filled labyrinth of the dappled green wood, stepping over the occasional trunk of one of the many fallen trees that lay like the ruins of some lost civilization around them.

As much as their card “readings” had been filled with all the usual, predictable nonsense, their journey had not been a complete waste of time.

_“You shouldn’t worry so much,” Mrs. Chattox said. “I’ve had another poor soul coming by here. Like you, he isn’t much inclined to be a believer in the cards, a believer in his fate. But his trouble’s far worse than yours—he faces a division that’s almost impossible to surmount.”_

So. He and Fancy were not the only ones to have stumbled across Mrs. Chattox’s forlorn little cottage, then, not the only ones “seeking answers from the cards.” Someone else, it seemed—someone who might very well be connected to the case—had been making his way out here as well...

Could it be Thomas Maxwell? The young researcher with the heavy-framed glasses and the mop of pop star hair, the one who was so clearly smitten with his Soviet counterpart? He might very well be seeking advice.

Morse scowled, then, rubbing fretfully at his forehead.

Because had he even managed to rule out Dr. Ellsworth himself, entirely?

_“Was he an older man?”_ Morse had asked.

And Mrs. Chattox had replied, “ _I wouldn’t say so.”_

That wasn’t a yes or a no. Would Mrs. Chattox call Dr. Ellsworth an “older man,” Morse wondered, when she seemed to consider herself as ageless and as eternal as Cronus himself?

Or could Mrs. Chattox’s lovelorn visitor have been someone else, someone hitherto unknown to him? Someone who worked up at the Bramford Power Station, one of the many people who had gone unquestioned by County five years ago, and were now going unquestioned by City?

Someone unhappy, someone unlucky in love … someone hoping to make an impression, much as Alicia Collins had wanted to win the attention of Nick Wilding....

Some researcher or engineer wanting to win the affection of a woman with champagne tastes, for example ….

Someone who might be tempted to sell any classified information on Britain’s nuclear energy program that might fall into his hands for ready cash ...

Or, for that matter, any information on whatever side projects might be underway up at the power plant, in what might perhaps be their very own version of Lab 4...

Morse looked up into the trees, then, into the heart of the effervescent green light that filtered through the leaves, and was reminded of that other green light—the strange green-tinted lowlights of the darkened Fenix factory, where he had run up a flight of metal stairs, gritting his teeth against the echoing sounds his footfalls made, his heart racing high in his chest.

And suddenly, a strangled scream tore both his thoughts and the golden air into two, sending the shadows of crows crying, snapping and crackling up out of the branches and into the sky.

Morse spun around, fearful that the old woman’s premonitions might yet have proven true. 

But Fancy was standing there before him, whole and unharmed, looking at something in his right hand.

_“What?_ ” Morse cried. “What is it?”

For a moment, Fancy mouthed wordlessly, much like a carp in the lily pond at Lovelace College.

“What is it?” Morse demanded.

“She put it in my pocket,” Fancy managed, at last. “She... she must have slipped it into my pocket …”

Fancy held out a Tarot card in his hand, and Morse snatched it away, looking down at the image there: that of a man lying face-down on the ground, with ten swords driven deep into his back.

“Oh, nice touch,” Morse said, as though Mrs. Chattox might hear him, even where he stood.

“Why?” Fancy gasped. “Why would she do that?”

For a moment, Morse said nothing, considering the card before him. Strange the old woman was, to be certain, but she didn’t strike Morse as being particularly malevolent.

Like the best of her kind, she was, he grudgingly had to admit, a sort of student of human nature, so as to read her patrons’ futures—not in the cards—but in their expressions, in their reactions to her words.

Surely, she could see it, Fancy’s impulsiveness, his lack of discretion, his roiling, restless energy, as eager as that of a bounding puppy....

Perhaps, in her own way, Mrs. Chattox was trying to help Fancy. Morse had told him much the same thing, in the past—of the dangers inherent in his lack of foresight, his lack of caution and good sense—and had thus far failed to make an impression.

Perhaps Mrs. Chattox thought that this card, as a remembrance, might?

“Maybe …,” Morse began. “Maybe she simply wants you to bear in mind what she said. She _did_ say your fate was not set in stone. That you could learn from the cards.”

Morse nearly choked on the words as he said them, riddled as they were with codswallop, but, on the other hand, they were words that perhaps Fancy needed to hear, all the same. 

Morse handed the card back to him.

“Keep it on the dash of the car,” he said. “That way, it might serve as a reminder. It might serve to give you pause, if you’re ever tempted to do anything rash.”

Fancy looked at him mulishly and shoved the card back into his pocket.

“I can’t do that. Everyone who sees it will have a go at me.”

Morse sighed.

“We can say it’s mine. How’s that?” 

Everyone at Cowley thought him odd enough as it was. What harm could one more alleged eccentricity do?

He thought then of that day he had hidden under the bed at Bixby’s, of how Fancy had not given him away.

_“Shhhhhh!”_ _Morse hissed, waving his hand downward, gesturing for Fancy to drop the bedspread back into place._

_Fancy let it fall and straightened, just as Inspector Thursday came to stand in the threshold of the doorway._

_“Fancy?” Thursday asked. “Were you saying something?”_

_Fancy blinked for a moment, and then he hummed, looking appreciatively around the room._

_“Mmmmm,” he said. “I was just wondering aloud, that’s all.”_

_“About what?” Thursday asked._

_He looked to the Inspector, then, and tilted his head._

_“If I ever make Chief Superintendent,” he asked, “do you think I might be able to swing a place like this?”_

_Thursday regarded him for a moment, his grim face a complete blank, and then he shook his head in despair, as if Fancy were a complete and hopeless idiot._

_And then he walked on._

_Fancy stood for a moment, waiting for the Inspector’s footsteps to fade. Then, he wheeled round, lifted the satin bedspread, and ducked his head under the bed, where Morse was listening, his eyes wide._

_“You owe me one!” Fancy said. “Now the Inspector thinks….”_

“Besides,” Morse said, glumly. “I owe you one.”

“Yeah?” Fancy asked.

“Why not?” Morse shrugged. “That way, any time you feel tempted to charge in somewhere, just take a look at it and remember what Mrs. Chattox said and wait for back up. Wait for me. It can’t happen if you aren’t alone. That’s what she said, right?” 

“Right,” Fancy said. “Thanks, Morse.”

“Don’t mention it.” 

Morse turned around, then, continuing on through trees lit by the September sun so as to resemble a canopy of stained-glass, illuminated in shades of brilliant gold and green.

“You know,” Fancy said. “I don’t care what people say. You’re actually a very nice person.”

He rolled his eyes at the backhanded compliment, the import of which had obviously flown over Fancy's head.

“Thanks, George,” he said.

He dug his hands deep into his pockets, then, determined to get back to the car without further incident. 

And then, he yelped as if he had been scalded.

As soon as he had reached into his pocket, he had felt it—the cardboard edge of a Tarot card.

“What did she give me this for?” he cried, pulling it out into the light.

He looked down to find that the final card of his reading had been slipped somehow into his coat pocket—the haughty and imperious King of Swords, sitting on his high throne. 

Fancy smirked, as if turnabout was fair play.

“Maybe she wants you to think on it some more. Maybe there’s something you are missing.”

Morse snorted. If he was missing anything, it was the identity of Mrs. Chattox’s visitor.

“So who _is_ the King of Swords?” Fancy asked. “Does Tony know about this?”

The warmth and light of the woods snapped off as if someone had thrown a switch, steeping all into shadow; it was as if his very vision had gone dark before him.

_“What?”_

And oh, god.

How many people were there, exactly, who knew? How many suspected? Thursday and then Joan…. And now Fancy…

If he was _that_ transparent….

“What do you mean?” Morse managed then, more sharply.

Fancy’s laughing face turned sober.

“Oh, you don’t have to worry about it, Morse. I’m not going to say anything. I never even noticed, really. It wasn’t me who figured it out. It was Shirl.”

Fancy seemed to think this information reassuring, despite the fact that it had the opposite effect, as the list in Morse’s head grew.

Thursday and Joan and Fancy …. and now Trewlove.

Morse looked at him coldly.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. And then he turned away, all crisp authority and sharp edges, stalking off through the woods in a manner that made his disapproval clear, in a manner that he would have thought might intimidate Fancy into silence.

“Oh, come on, Morse,” Fancy said. “We’re friends, aren’t we? You don’t have to lie to me. No one goes to that many ‘ _concerts.’”_

Morse frowned, then, and he wheeled around, despite himself.

“But we _do_ go to concerts,” he said.

“Oh,” Fancy said.

Morse turned away once more, continuing off into the trees, the bristling set of his shoulders making it clear that _that_ , as far as he was concerned, was the end of the conversation. The end of all of conversation.

In fact, the sooner they got out of this strange wood, the better. 

But then, how to explain it? That niggling doubt, that feeling of unease burrowing deep in his chest? 

Suddenly, he remembered how Fancy and Trewlove had stood poised at the top of the bridge, falling into an embrace as the sky had turned rose-gold behind them.

Perhaps Fancy _did_ know a little something about it.

Morse turned around again.

“What’s …” he began uncertainly. “What’s _wrong_ with going to concerts?”

“Nothing,” Fancy assured him, clearly fearful now of falling further into Morse’s black books.

But Morse kept on searching his face, as if demanding an answer.

“It’s just…” Fancy said, then. “I dunno. Tony doesn’t really seem the sort to go in for that heavy, highbrow stuff all the time …. does he?”

Oh.

Was that all?

Morse snorted.

“Of course, he likes concerts. Tony likes to do whatever I like.”

Morse spun around and continued on, then, crashing through the trees with an exaggerated brusqueness, determined never to broach such a topic again, with Fancy or with anyone.....

... but still, that troubled feeling remained with him, all the same.

Because that hadn't sounded quite right...

Had it?

Incredibly, Fancy went right on talking, just as the wind blows right through the open windows of an abandoned house, rattling on through the empty rooms.

“Sorry,” Fancy said. “I didn’t mean ... Look. I don’t think that card means all that much, really. Actually…. I sort of thought the King of Swords is supposed to be you.”

And that was even more ridiculous.

Morse drew to a halt, rounding on Fancy.

“I’m not at all like that.”

Fancy took a few steps back. 

“If you say so,” he said.

Morse scowled.

“Besides,” he said. “She said the King of Swords represented someone who would help me in the future. It doesn’t make sense to say I would be in my own future. Isn’t that a given?”

“I dunno,” Fancy grumbled. “I would sort of like to be in my own future.”

Morse shook his head, then, in despair.

There was no way he was getting back on that merry-go-round again.

“If you need something to occupy your thoughts, such as they are,” Morse pronounced, turning away, “perhaps you might see fit to help me with the case.”

Then, Fancy fell silent for a moment, a worse sign, really, when Morse thought about it, than when he was talking. Morse could almost feel it, Fancy’s questioning doubts hanging heavy in the air.

“What?” Morse asked. 

“I dunno. I sort of wondered. Why didn’t you just show her your warrant card? Then she’d _have_ to answer. Maybe we could have even taken her into the station. If you think it’s so pertinent, who might have been digging around out here ….”

Morse spun around again, and, this time, if Fancy was intimidated, then Morse was glad of it.

“George,” he said. “We aren’t on the case.”

“Huh?”

“We aren’t on this case.”

Mercifully, a dawning light of comprehension lit across Fancy’s face. “Oh, yeah….”

Morse sighed.

He could only hope that his memory would hold through the end of the day, that he would be able to keep in mind that this visit to Bramford was meant to be a secret between them.

If only Mrs. Chattox had left a card as a reminder of that, too, Morse would have considered their fortunes money well-spent indeed.

****

“Where have you been?” Thursday rumbled.

“Nowhere,” Morse said.

“Just down at the pub,” Fancy said.

Morse blinked, surprised at the deftness with which Fancy had come up with the lie; perhaps he was far more discreet than he had given him credit for.

“Morse just spotted me for lunch,” he chirped.

And then, Morse closed his eyes as if in pain.

The idea that Morse might buy Fancy lunch was improbable to say the least, especially these days, considering he had been redoubling his efforts to build up his savings.

Thursday cast a dark gaze over the pair of them, as if to let them know his suspicions.

“Mr. Bright’s been waiting for you. Wants to brief everyone about this party tonight.”

Morse said nothing, only followed Thursday into Mr. Bright’s office with Fancy in his wake, resigned to the fact that this party was going to happen whether he willed it or no.

The moving finger writes and having writ moves on.

And nothing he might have to say could change one word of it.

One didn’t need to be a believer in the cards, a believer in fate, to predict that Bixby would never fail to seize any opportunity—even a neighbor’s involvement with a group of Soviet chess enthusiasts and computer researchers—to throw one of his legendary and outrageous and appalling parties.

***

“The most important thing is that all goes smoothly,” Mr. Bright said. “We don’t need any incidents, yes?”

_“You mean any more incidents. Since it's quite likely Dr. Ellsworths’ death was anything but a heart attack,”_ Morse supplied in his head, but, wisely, he kept his thoughts to himself.

From his place by the door, Jakes pulled a cigarette from the corner of his mouth and smirked with satisfaction—a sure sign that some great witticism was to come.

“Let’s just hope Morse doesn’t end up on the roof again,” he said, laughing.

Morse rolled his eyes, refusing to rise to Jakes’ bait.

Because what was the point of it?

Mr. Bright cut Jakes a severe look and continued on, just as if he had not been interrupted.

“Remember. We are not to get above ourselves. Special Branch has made it clear, it’s their bailiwick. If you see anything untoward, deal quietly and report it straight to me.”

And of course, they would.

And then he would report it straight to Dempsey. 

It was just too much. 

“Are they certain that they really want police officers at this party?” Morse said, tartly. “Wouldn’t they do better to hire a firm of security guards to do their bidding for the evening?”

As he had done with Jakes, Mr. Bright ignored him, continuing on.

“Now at the end of the evening, we’ll gather on the east lawn for the pyrotechnics display,” Mr. Bright said.

_“Pyrotechnics!”_ Morse cried.

And this time, his voice sounded through the crowded office so emphatically that it could not be ignored; instead, every officer in the room turned to look at him.

But Morse could not even register the expressions on their faces.

How could Bixby even _think_ to schedule a pyrotechnics display for this blasted party? Hadn’t he told him his theory?

About earth and water ….

…. and fire? 

“He _can’t!”_ Morse shouted. “He _can’t!_ do such a thing. He ….”

Thursday glowered at him, his jaw set fiercely on edge, and Morse thought the better of it and snapped his mouth shut.

Because of course, Bixby could. It was just what he had done the last time their paths had crossed, wasn’t it?

_“And what about this party?” Morse asked. Strange said there was a party at . . . Bixby’s? That he’d been called in on detail?”_

_“Yeah,” Jakes said. “The man must be mad. He says he planned it in commemoration of some posh gala, some art exhibition held a hundred years ago. That the invitations had gone out long ago.”_

_Morse sat bolt upright in his seat._

_“What exhibition?” he asked._

_“I dunno, Morse.”_

_“Not Ernest Gambart’s party?”_

_“That might have been it, yeah. Why? What of it?"_

_“Ernest Gambart was an art dealer in London who, a little more than a hundred years ago, proclaimed he was throwing the party of the season, a party revolving around a showing of a painting. “The Finding of the Savior in the Temple,” by William Holman Hunt.”_

_“Yeah, that’s the to-do Bright mentioned. Mad, eh? To have a party featuring a Pre-Raphaelite painting right in the middle of this mess?”_

_“I’d say so,” Morse huffed. “ Considering that that party ended in disaster. Gambart hired a theatrical gaslighting expert for the occasion, to set a certain mood for the evening, and to show the large canvas to its full effect. Only someone lit a match, and the place blew sky high.”_

It was just as he had told Jakes two years ago. 

It was as if Bixby was inviting the killer to come.

“Is there a problem, Morse?” Mr. Bright said.

“No, sir,” Morse replied.

Mr. Bright narrowed his eyes at him, the doubt clear in his lean face. And it was completely unfair; Jakes’ little comment had been far less constructive than anything Morse had to say. Morse had _grounds_ to feel this was a terrible idea.

“Let me remind you,” Mr. Bright said. “You are a DC of only a few months’ standing. It’s not down to you to question your elders and betters, yes?”

Morse swallowed them down, then, all of those wrong words. Thursday was looking at him with impatience, and it wasn’t fair.

“Sir.”

But they had it all wrong. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know when to hold his peace. He was skilled at keeping silent, he was a master.... but sometimes, it was just impossible to keep silent...

Especially when he had so much to say.

***

“What’s the matter with you?” Thursday said, once they were alone in the corridor, heading out for the day. “Why did you have to speak that way to Mr. Bright? You think it gives the man any joy? You think it doesn’t hurt his pride, bowing to those ponces? He was policing when you were toddling about in diapers.”

Morse said nothing. 

“Trouble with you is, you don’t know when to quit.”

And there, at last, was something upon which they could agree.

“No,” Morse said. “No, I don’t.” 

*****

Morse struck out across the shadowed lawns, lopping along with a rolling gait up towards the grand palace of a house, its golden limestone walls lit up against the velvet sky with such extravagance so as to make it to look as if the whole place were already ablaze with fire.

All around him, from varying points along the curving drive, guests in evening suits and jewel-toned gowns were moving towards the wide front doors, drawn to that light just as moths with otherworldly green and translucent wings are drawn in towards a beaconing glow.

And even as Morse watched their progress with jaded eyes, he counted himself amongst them. He was within and without: his thoughts tumbling with tattered wings, even as his steps, quick and steady, carried him smoothly on.

Already, he could hear it, the din of conversation, the roar of laugher, the psychedelic spiral of electric guitars, carrying out into the hushed coolness of the night.

Here, even from this distance, it seemed all too much—a torrent of color and sound so great as to blind and deafen a man to all else. But, yet, amidst it all, there were two thoughts that sustained him.

For one, he certainly didn’t come all this way to be a security guard. Thursday had been right on that score.

He didn’t know when to quit.

And although Thursday had meant it as a reprimand, Morse felt that it might well have been the kindest, the most reassuring thing he had said to him in a long while. 

Even during all of those years of terror and defeat, there had been _something_ there. Something there that had remained despite all of the efforts of that man to leave him cowed, something that had prompted him to try, one last time, to break free.

He hadn’t given up then, nor was he about to now.

That thought—and the thought of finding amongst the crowds the one person he needed to speak to above all others— would be enough to see him through this wretched night.

Across the lawns, Trewlove was on Fancy’s arm, and Morse smiled to himself—even in a white gown and evening suit, they were instantly recognizable, even from this distance—Trewlove from her measured steps, brisk and all business, Fancy from the way he seemed to roll along beside her. Before the front door, Mr. Bright stood speaking with Thomas Maxwell and Professor Gredenko, flicking away his cigarette ash with urbane ease.

But where was Sergeant Jakes?

It wasn’t like him to be late.

Morse swung his head around, casting a glance over his shoulder, scanning the currents of party-goers as they moved across the darkening lawns.

Then he turned his gaze back up to the house, to the wide front doors growing steadily nearer and nearer. Instinctively, he drew in a final breath of crisp and chilled evening air, just as if he were a diver about to go underwater, taking his last chance to brace himself before entering a world of strange oceanic light.

***

The house was all just as Morse had remembered it, its high and arching pristine white walls aglow with party lights, set in soft circles of rose and chartreuse and summer-day blue, even as all else was cast into shadow. Arrangements of wild and whimsical hothouse flowers grew up out of alabaster vases, as cascades of white balloons floated down along the bannisters, like moons broken free of their orbits, in an incandescent shimmer. All around him, people were talking and talking while hearing no one, even as the band played on, circling the same stubborn chords with notes like birds in a wind storm, hovering up and down the dizzying scales.

He had barely made it in through the front hall, when a waiter nodded to him, extending a silver tray holding a single, clear, bulbous glass filled with what appeared to marijuana cigarettes.

Morse waved the man off, scarcely able to believe it.

This was meant to be a diplomatic affair; there were police here for heaven’s sakes.

And more to the point: who amongst them could bear to smoke the stuff in such a place?

Wasn’t the reality presented here, right before their wondering eyes, near enough to being drugged, just as it was?

Morse shook his head in disapproval and continued on through the crowds, and then, there he was, on the stairs, dressed in a well-cut evening suit, standing six or seven steps up, as if to place himself on stage, as if he were well-aware of the figure he cut and was keen to put himself on full display.

“Morse,” he called out, right on cue. “Back for seconds, old man?”

Morse rolled his eyes, but quirked a smile, despite himself.

He was one of the few, he supposed, who knew the actor before him as he was at his ease, backstage—one of the few who knew the truth behind the part Joss Bixby so loved to play.

“Hardly,” Morse huffed.

“Come now. You can’t say you don’t like what I’ve done with the place. After all, it’s all in the name of putting our best foot forward for our illustrious guests, isn’t it? My duty to crown and country, one might say.”

“I need to talk to you,” Morse said.

Bixby frowned at his bluntness; Morse wasn’t playing his part.

But nor could he, at this moment, even if he tried. 

Bixby came down the stairs towards him then, his face betraying his confusion. Then he smiled, as if to were all one, and set his hand warm on his shoulder, steering him off into the heart of the party, where, paradoxically, the surrounding din would make it all the safer to talk.

They walked side by side through rooms braced with Corinthian columns and embellished with plaster leaves and blooms that brushed the ascending archways, trailing up to the vaulted ceilings as if to the very skies, all of it lit up in a kaleidoscope of colors, rendering the house into a world fantastical. Even as they walked along, Bixby’s hand riding solid on Morse’s shoulder, Bix couldn’t help but to cast his gaze upwards and smile, clearly caught up in the marvels of his own creation, a firm believer in his own magic spell. 

“So?” Bixby promoted, at last, leaning in towards his ear. “You wanted to speak with me, old man?”

 _“Pyrotechnics?”_ Morse said, simply. “Really?”

“Ah,” Bixby said. “Stroke of genius, isn’t it?”

For a moment, Morse was rendered utterly speechless.

“Just the opposite, I would have thought,” he said, at last.

Bixby’s smile fell into retreat, a ripple of bewilderment moving across his brow. He firmed his grip on his shoulder, then, exerting a gentle pressure so as to turn him around, so that they were standing face to face.

“I thought you’d be pleased,” Bixby said. “It was your idea.”

 _“My_ idea?”

“Yes. Yes, of course. Weren’t you lamenting, just the other night, how no one took your theories seriously?” he asked. “How Inspector Thursday dismissed you?”

“Well, yes,” Morse said. “I suppose, but….”

“Well, then,” Bix continued, spreading his arms wide. “Et voila. Here I am. Just the man you’ve been looking for.”

For a moment, Morse said nothing, as Bixby watched him hopefully.

And as he stood there, grounded by Bixby’s warm hand on his shoulder, looking into his steady dark eyes, Morse found he could see only himself reflected there, hesitant and uncertain amidst stars of red and blue and green light .... and then, he saw something else there, too ..... a determination that he really only saw in his own reflection, the same determination he had seen when he had looked into the rearview mirror on his first day as a PC, when he had imagined himself as Inspector Morse, with sharp blue eyes and elegant white hair.

It was as evident in the intensity in Bixby’s eyes as it was in the extravagance of his party.

Bixby didn’t know when to quit. 

“I suppose,” Morse conceded. “Although I can’t say that’s how I’d go about it. Rather chaotic, isn’t it? A bit risky, what with all of these people here?”

“Ah,” he said, leading him once more through the party. “I’ve forgotten. You’re not a gambling man.”

“No,” Morse said. “No, I’m not. Particularly with other people’s lives,” he added pointedly.

Bixby stopped and turned him round again, frowning as if slightly wounded, lowering his face towards him.

“Nothing is going to happen, Morse. I would never allow for that. I would have thought you would have known that.”

And to that, Morse had no answer. 

Because it was true, really. For all of his scheming, Bixby had always been there, even when Morse himself had sensed no danger. He had always been there, all along. At the funfair he had attended with Joan and Sam. At the Fenix factory as he had raced along the metal top walk. At the strange house on Canterbury Road, when he had closed his eyes and waited for the end. At the last party when he had sought refuge from both Deare on the one hand and Gull on the other. Even there, as he had clung to the edge of the roof, when Bixby had reached out for him further than he would have thought anyone would ever care to risk.

Not for him, anyway.

“Haven’t you learned anything at all of those chess matches you’ve been attending?” Bixby asked. “The way to win, is not simply to bide your time. But to force your opponent’s hand. The thing is, to keep control of the board, old man.”

“And are we?” Morse asked.

“Are we what?”

“In control of the board.”

“Of course, we are, old man,” Bixby said, the smile back in his voice. “Of course, we are.”

“Trust me,” he said, continuing on, guiding him once more through the crowds, “I speak from experience. It’s far better to deal with these things on your own ground than to let your opponent dictate terms. And besides. I have my people on it.”

“What ‘people?’” Morse asked. “You don’t have any ‘people.’ You’re off the case the same as I am.”

For the first time, Morse noted a glimmer of uncertainty cross Bixby’s face.

But then Bix stopped, turning him round again so that his thumb brushed against his collarbone with a warmth the radiated even through the fabric of his evening suit.

“Not to worry, Morse. And besides, you’re forgetting the most important thing.”

“And what’s that?”

“We’ll be there,” he said simply.

And again, Morse had no answer for that.

“What can go wrong, with us to keep an eye on things, hmmmm?” Bixby persisted. “It’s far better than how our respective “teams,” shall we say, are playing it, isn’t it? A house divided will soon fall.”

His dark eyes were shining with such boundless optimism that it seemed useless to remind him that that was rather the point— that it seemed that someone amongst the higher-ups _wanted_ the house to fall, wanted the cases to be swept under the carpet, to remain hushed up, unsolved.

Little comfort as that might be to whoever else might yet fall victim along the line.

“We’re each a force to be reckoned with as it is, if I do say so myself,” Bixby said. “But the both of us working together?” I rather like our odds. I know where I’d put my money.”

And what could Morse say in the face of such ardent faith? In such faith in even him? It seemed a poor return not to pay it back in kind.

“Meet me out at the patio of the east wing before midnight,” Bixby said. “If something is to come, we’ll be ready for it. Do we have a deal, old man?”

“All right,” Morse said, even as a shadow of doubt fell once more across his thoughts as Bixby’s choice of words brought fresh to mind Sergeant Jakes’ recent spate of barbs.

So.

The spell would end at midnight. 

Hopefully, all that might happen is for the Jag to turn into a pumpkin.

At least, if it did, it would spare him the mockery and humiliation he was bound to face when the others caught sight of the Tarot card cello-taped to the dash there. 

***

Anthony Donn took a flute of champagne from a silver tray that seemed almost to float before him, perched as it was on the fingertips of an agile server skimming his way through the crowds. He lifted the glass and took a thoughtful sip, letting the bubbles play across his upper lip in a sprightly tingle as he looked about, taking in the dazzle of the party.

It was all a little much, but that was Bixby’s style, after all. What he had sort of banked on, really.

A sparkle of decadence, a golden layering of glitz.

Give the people what they expected, what they wanted.

He was just beginning to turn away, when, there he was. He was difficult to miss, really. The moment Morse’s eyes met his, they widened, the blueness there intensifying so as to be visible from halfway across the room, easily drowning out all of the errant electric party lights.

Tony paused, perplexed.

If he didn’t know better, he’d say that Morse had been looking for him.

Tony knew all too well that Morse was on duty tonight, and, as such, he would have thought that he’d be keen to give him a wide berth. He had seemed so awkward at the chess match, as if he thought that in the simple act of standing beside him, he might reveal too much, divulge the secret of whatever it was that lay between them.

But now, he was turning his shoulders sideways to make his way through the crowds, as if drawn by some invisible thread leading him straight to his side.

Tony remained where he was, watching his approach, wondering what it could be to cause the slight strain of worry that lay there, in the lines of his face.

“Tony,” he said, when he drew up beside him at last, and he was slightly out of breath, so that Tony felt it, his anxiousness, as if it were contagious.

For a moment, Tony was rendered quite speechless; he hadn’t expected for to him to acknowledge him, at all, really, let alone to swoop down on him so.

He wasn’t even sure how to address him, in such a place as this.

He had told him the other night to call him Endeavour, but the name felt heavy, wrong in his mouth, especially here, amidst the din of conversation and the chaotic maneuverings of the music of the band.

Tony had only just gotten used to calling him Morse, really, because, truth be told, for all of his new ways, for all of the new sharpness and wariness in his eyes, in some corner of Tony’s mind, he was still Pagan.

And there was some space inside of him, Tony knew, where he always would be Pagan—a space in which the man standing before him would remain perpetually nineteen years old, lying with his hands behind his head as he lay stretched out on a carpet, his eyes softly closed as a record revolved in its slow and steady course on the turntable. 

Because there was a part of him, too, that would forever remain nineteen—some hidden, younger self who would be forever sitting in a chair in their old college digs, ostensibly reading over an essay, or translating some passage of Homer, but who was, in reality, watching Pagan, brimful of a feeling that he could not name, but which he would later understand to be a fledgling sort of veneration. 

Because what was Pagan thinking?

What was it that he was hearing there?

Tony would have been listening to the same score, following the ebb and flow of the same notes, and it was nice, really. Just as everything in his life had been nice, for as long as he could remember. And would, most likely, go on being nice, on into his future, to the end of his days.

So what was hidden there, in those pleasant sounds, that should make Pagan’s face look so? What was he hearing there, to give his face that glow of a Renaissance saint, at once soft and dreamy and yet tense with an almost orgiastic ecstasy?

Tony had not the slightest clue.

But he wished that he did.

“Tony,” he said again, and now that he had drawn nearer, Tony saw it, a flush along his face, the kaleidoscope eyes filled with a glittering fervency. 

And of course.

He was on the case.

“Good evening, Morse,” Tony said.

And he was Morse, now, all edges and impatience.

“How do you like my little party?” he asked. “Bixby did the thing up right, didn’t he?” 

“Hmmmm,” he said, casting an obligatory glance around, even though it was clear that he couldn’t care less.

Then, he turned back around to him.

“Tony. I have to ask you something.”

Tony sighed.

“I’m sorry, Morse. I really don’t know a thing about Dr. Ellsworth’s personal life. If indeed the poor old boy even had one.” 

“No,” Morse said. “No. It’s not about that.”

His eyes wavered over his face, then, flitting about with the nervousness of a sparrow in a hedgerow. Tony smiled, shifting his weight back onto one foot and lifting his glass as he regarded him, hoping to put him at his ease.

“Oh,” Tony said. “Well. I’m almost disappointed.”

“What?” Morse asked.

“I’ve never been properly questioned by the police before. It might make for quite a little thrill.”

Morse heaved a sigh, then, but his stance relaxed all the same.

_“Tony.”_

He breathed the word as if it were in and of itself a reprimand. Then, he tugged on his ear, cast his gaze down, as if he couldn’t bring himself to meet his eyes.

Ah.

And it had to be that.

He couldn’t say he didn’t see it coming.

Tony had felt it, just the other morning. The sense that, after all of this time, they had arrived at the crossroads.

Typically, they had only stolen moments to share, the shadow of the world pressing always between them—it was there in the fear that someone might happen upon them, in the anxiety of the ticking of a clock, the reminder that Morse might be late for the work, or late in getting back to the Thursdays’, therefore creating cause to question where he had been.

They both of them knew he was a terrible liar.

But there, in the silence of the lake house, Tony had awoken to find Endeavour still there, still lying beside him on the narrow bed, quiet and still save for the rise and fall of his breathing ... and it really was Endeavour—his eyes softly closed, the lines of his angular face bearing no signs of the tension or tenderness that it bore as he listened to music— but rather in utter repose, as if finally at rest. 

And in that hushed blue hour, as Tony lay watching him sleeping, he came to feel that perhaps they really were much like the light of Betelgeuse, finding its way home at last, as if this moment was where they had been headed, all along.

When Endeavour opened his eyes, Tony thought he might startle, or spring up with a jolt, fearful of being late for work, or unhappy at finding himself scrutinized while he had been off, dreaming in oblivion.

But instead, Endeavour remained just where he was, his eyes meeting Tony’s as cool and as expectant as the blue rising dawn.

And then, slowly, his face relaxed into a smile.

For the space of a handful of heartbeats, they looked at one another, face to face, saying nothing, until an edge of self-consciousness crept into Endeavour’s smile and he picked up a pillow, half-laughing as he buried his face in it. 

Tony had smiled, too; he honestly hadn’t expected anything else… but even there, in the next moment, Tony’s grin faded…

Because that moment of unguardedness, while the rest of the world slept and even the shadows of the lake house had not yet begun to move with the course of the sun, that one moment—as still and as clear and as shallow as a mirror—was all, really, they could ever hope for.

There was nowhere to go from there, was there?

The beginning was always destined to hold within it the end, their fledgling smiles like nestlings hatched too early, into too harsh a world.

Doubtless, Morse, always stewing, always lost in thought, had arrived to the same conclusion.

And suddenly, his anxiousness was all too understandable.

A clean break. A swift end to it all. A few words of parting in a public place, so there wouldn’t be a scene.

Dear Lord.

Is that what he was thinking?

As if Tony were even capable of such a thing. Surely Morse should know his breeding, if not his pride, would not allow for that.

“If it’s about the other night… ,” Tony said. “You aren’t … Well,” and then he tossed out an off-hand little laugh, as if it hardly mattered. “You are hardly obligated….”

Obligated.

Tony could hardly bring himself to say it.

It _was_ an ugly word, wasn’t it?

But Morse’s face clouded, clearly confused.

“What?” he asked.

“No,” he said, then. “I ... No, it’s not ... It’s …. There’s something I have to ask you.”

Tony frowned, furrowing his brow in wonder, willing Morse to slow them down a bit, whatever thoughts lay spiraling behind his blue eyes, whatever caused that hitch in his breath heard plain in his struggle to speak—a struggle that seemed to go deeper than the awkwardness that had always been Pagan.

Sometimes, Tony couldn’t see it, the mark left by those five lost years.

Other times he could.

But surely, after all this time, he knew there was nothing he couldn’t ask him.

“I wanted to ask.…” Morse began.

“Yes?” Tony prompted.

Morse scowled, as if uncertain how to phrase it, and Tony watched him eagerly, with no idea why he should look so solemn, nor any clue as to what might have happened between them to have left him troubled so.

Morse’s eyes wandered the room, then, as if casting about for some source of unseen aid, and then, in an instant, he went utterly still, with such a swiftness that Tony couldn’t help but follow his gaze, to see what could have prompted such a change in his expression.

Across the room, his colleague, Sergeant Jakes, was making a beeline for him through the crowds, a crease set deep between his heavy brows.

Morse regarded him for a moment, lost in thought. And little wonder. The man looked like he might faint, as if he feared the whole place might blow sky high at any moment.

“I have to go,” Morse said, and there was a definite shift in his voice, in his posture, in his whole bearing.

And there they were. 

There they always were.

“There’s a lot on,” Tony supplied. “I know.”

He was sorry he said it. He had tried to sound airily indifferent, but hadn’t quite succeeded.

Morse shook his head slightly, as if he had heard it all too clear, the impatience, the resignation there in his voice, and was trying to slough it off.

“Tony… I can’t… I…”

Tony knew he was being unfair, really.

But then, the world was unfair.

Of course Morse could not risk being overheard saying—well, whatever the hell it was he felt he needed to say to him with such solemnity—by his colleagues, should not even be seen standing so close to him, despite the excuse of the din of the room, so close that Tony could feel the breath of his sigh along the side of his face.

Morse looked once more at Jakes, watching his progress through the crowds, and then his gaze swept back to him, a fresh new deepness in the blueness there, the blue of that softening dawn.

“Will you meet me later?” Morse asked. “But not here. Out by the greenhouses? Say around ten o’clock?”

And in that blue, there was something. Tony wasn’t sure what it was, exactly… but whatever it was, at that moment, he would have happily have told him that he would meet him on the moon, if he had so asked him, let alone out by those sodden old greenhouses.

“All right,” Tony said.

Morse nodded, a bit curtly, and headed off to intercept Sergeant Jakes.

And Tony shouldn’t have done it, he supposed. But he simply couldn’t resist.

“We’ll make a date of it,” he called.

Morse stopped and turned around, casting a lingering look over his shoulder, his forehead pulled into a scowl so severe that it would be easy to miss the slow curve of his downturned mouth, a movement as subtle as a brush of feathers—one that would most likely have passed unseen by any other, but which Tony knew to be a smile.


	15. Chapter 15

Peter Jakes walked through room after room of the palatial stone house on Lake Silence, on into the heart of the party, but he saw nothing.

Once, he might have looked about, nodding in approval as he took it all in—the blue and rose lights casting soft colors against softer shadows on ornate walls, the couples dancing and intertwining and slipping off into darkened corners, the silver trays laden with flutes of amber champagne, the bold red and black of the spinning roulette wheel—but now, it all seemed empty and hollow, a desperate pursuit after nothing.

He had never been one to give himself over to his feelings much, having long lived by the adage that the less that you showed of yourself, the better.

But tonight, he felt as if he were floating, just like one of those ruddy moon-glow balloons that had broken free from the staircase bannister, now tossed about by the playful hands of the party guests, suspended in mid-air above them.

Once, such news would have seemed like the end of the world, filling Peter with visions of closed doors and gray, workaday struggle. But tonight, as soon as Hope had told him about the baby, he felt as if something within him was rising, as fresh and as bracing as endless blue skies. As if all of the threads of his life were converging at last into something that made sense.

Peter had kissed her and told her that he was putting his papers in. That of course, he’d go with her, back to the States.

Hell, he would have followed her to the ends of the earth, let alone to Wyoming.

He had known that the nick would be empty, what with this to-do going on, but he couldn’t help it, he couldn’t wait another moment. He felt it with each step, a new urgency, as if already he was crossing an ocean, just as he was, even on foot.

He had snapped on the lights in the silent and darkened offices and typed up his letter of resignation, leaving it on top of Mr. Bright’s desk.

It wasn’t ideal. He would have preferred to have told him, face to face. In fact, he felt as if he _needed_ to speak of it, to someone, anyone—if only to prove to himself that it was all real.

But yet, Peter was wary of sharing his secret, too. The blokes he regularly hung ‘round with down at the Flag had been the first who had sprung to mind, but then, when he thought about it, he found that he didn’t quite trust them, when it came down to it. Not really. Not with this.

They might very well jibe at him, snicker at the circumstances, say something crass.

_“Snared good and proper now, eh, Peter Rabbit?”_

_“Well, you know what they say about rabbits, and that was certainly quick off the mark_.”

Peter scowled sharply at the very thought of it.

He wanted to hear none of that. Not one word.

He wasn’t sure what he was feeling, exactly, but he knew that whatever it was, it was the best, the purest thing ever to swoop down and claim him. He didn’t want it sullied or tarnished—not even by so much as a knowing wink.

Funny, wasn’t it? When you found you actually needed a friend?

Who would have imagined that, in that moment, the men he counted as his closest mates—the men he shared a pint and a game of darts with, week in and week out— should all come up wanting.

That the man he should find himself thinking of instead, should be Morse.

For all that Morse was a right pain in the arse, when it came to the important things, Morse was all right, really.

Leastways, he had class. Could be counted on not to laugh or to leer, or to make some crass remark.

Peter knew that Morse would be about the party somewhere, but after checking in all the likely places—the abandoned library, the quieter corners of the great hall, where Peter was sure he might find him nursing a Scotch and rolling his eyes at the display of decadence around him—he had almost given up on finding him.

But then, there he was, glancing up at him from out of the midst of the party. And Morse must have seen it, some hint of it in his expression, because he frowned, his face full of concern. 

Christ.

From the way Morse was staring at him, Peter must have looked as if he were going to faint.

At once, Morse headed off towards him, and as he approached, his scowl deepened, his full mouth falling into a straight line bracketed by those lines of disapproving parentheses.

Morse widened his eyes at him, then—eyes that were already too big for his face— so that they looked like those of a character in a comic strip, giving him that daft look he sometimes got, half-way between impatient and incredulous.

“What?” Morse asked.

God, he’d miss him.

And wasn’t that, too, a funny thought? That he should realize that only now?

“Sergeant Jakes?” Morse prompted. “What is it? Have you heard anything about the pyrotechnics display?”

“What?” Jakes asked.

“Have you picked up on anything?” he hissed. “Is something going on?”

And then it all caught up with him. He had forgotten all about that incident back at the nick, how Morse had seemed so obsessed with those bloody pyrotechnics.

Poor Morse.

Leave it to him to worry about a bit of fun.

But Peter felt a glimmer of empathy for the bloke, too. They were both the same, he and Morse, weren’t they? Never completely able to shed their pasts?

Well.

No more.

And perhaps that, too, was a part of it—a part of why he had wanted to speak of it to Morse.

To show him the thing could be done, after all.

“No,” Jakes said. “No. I just wanted to tell you. I’ve put my papers in.”

And It was worth it, telling Morse first—if for no other reason than to see that rare and uncharacteristic struggle of confusion on his face, that visible shifting of gears.

“You’ve resigned?”

“Yeah.”

“You kept that quiet.”

“I’ve only just come from the nick,” Jakes said. “I left my papers on Mr. Bright’s desk.”

Morse’s big eyes were scrutinizing him, and Jakes could see the wheels really working there, trying to puzzle it out, could see the question clear in his face.

“I’ve been seeing this girl,” Peter said. “And she’s …. well…. pregnant.”

Morse blinked with surprise.

“I see,” he said, primly, noncommittally. It was as if he were reserving all judgment either way, waiting to see how he, Peter, felt about it.

“It’s the right thing.”

“Hmmm,” Morse said, still keeping his face carefully neutral. 

But how to say it? Because it was more than that. It wasn’t only right in that it was simply his duty. It really was right, all of it was right, it was perfect.

“Not in that way,” he hastened to add. 

Morse tilted his head, cautiously expectant.

“Funny,” Jakes said. “It crosses your mind, something like that. I thought it would be the worst thing that could happen to a bloke, but now it’s here, it’s about one of the best.”

And, slowly, Morse smiled, a smile that reached his overlarge eyes. 

“She’s a great girl,” Peter said.

“I’m sure she is,” Morse replied, his smile deepening now to match the new warmth in his low voice. “Congratulations.”

And that word was all that Peter had wanted to hear.

“We’re getting married in a few weeks. But not here. America. She’s been doing a , er… what d’you call it, a doctorate, is it? At Lady Matilda’s.”

And then, Morse’s smile did take on a trace of smugness, but Jakes knew the meaning of that all too well.

For all of Peter’s talk against the colleges, for all of his reverse snobbery, here he was, marrying a Mathildabeest.

Town and gown. Morse was thinking they were a regular Romeo and Juliet.

But Jakes didn’t mind him having a go at him about that. That was fair enough.

“All her family’s out there,” he said. “Wyoming. Old man’s in the cattle business. Gonna take me on.”

“Right,” Morse said, a trace of reserve flooding back into his face.

And again, Peter understood. To Morse, that might sound something awful. Morse in Wyoming, Morse not in Oxford, Morse not living in a city of libraries and concerts and dreaming spires, wouldn’t really be Morse, would it?

But Peter had a feeling it would suit him just fine.

“Outdoor work,” he said. “Clean air. Leave all this behind. A new start.”

Morse nodded, then, as if he understood.

He was happy for him.

And when it came down to it, that was all that Peter wanted.

Someone to be happy for him.

Something harder to find in this world than you would think, really.

“When do you….. ?” Morse began.

“End of the week.”

And then his eyes flew wide again.

“That soon?”

“When you’re number’s up,” Peter said, with a shrug. “We’re planning on having a few drinks at the Lamb and Flag. Just mates.”

Morse’s face clouded at that—and it was true—perhaps Peter hadn’t counted him among that number before, but .....

But then, Peter realized that it wasn’t only that unexpected phrase that was troubling Morse—that there was some further question there, blooming in the set lines of his face.

“How do you…. ?” Morse began.

And then he shook his head.

“Never mind.”

Poor sod.

Most likely, there was some mousy little thing he had been running into down at the library, and he was working up the courage to ask her out to a lecture on Ming dynasty pottery.

Or maybe that birdwatcher had caught up with him, the one who had given him the old eye, and they had been spending many a riveting evening discussing the migratory patterns of the common grackle, or whatever the hell it was.

What wild times they must have.

Peter huffed a laugh and clapped a hand heartily on Morse’s shoulder.

“You just know, Morse,” Peter said. “You just know.”

He gave his shoulder a final encouraging squeeze, and then he headed off into the party, a new spring in his step, off to finish one last job.

****

Well.

That was sudden.

How could Sergeant Jakes be so sure, so soon?

How did he know?

Morse wasn’t certain, but he couldn’t help but to mull it over as he meandered through the cathedral-like rooms, twirling the question round and round in his mind in much the same manner as Bixby was wont to twirl a gold gambling chip between his fingers. So lost was he in his own thoughts, in fact, that he was blind and deaf to all else—and the next thing he knew, he had bumped smack into a young woman with long, thick tresses of chestnut hair.

She turned around, and Morse felt the heat rising at once into his face, so that he knew he was flushing pink, even in the peculiar light.

“I’m sorry, Miss,” he said.

But the girl only smiled brightly—and it wasn’t an empty, polite smile, but a smile of recognition.

“Oh, hello, Constable Morse,” she said. “I was hoping I might run into you here.”

Morse blinked, twisting his mouth up in thought, trying to place her.

He knew for certain he hadn’t seen her at Lovelace College, or at any of the chess matches. Was she a part of the Lake Silence set? Had he known her when she was up? Was she some old friend of Susan’s? Would any awkward little catch-up be required of him?

Try as he might, he couldn’t come up with a name or even a glimmer of a memory—and he was sure he would have remembered her from her wild and rippling hair alone, hair so thick that it seemed to stand out inches from either side of her face, framing it rather like that of Jane Morris in a Pre-Raphaelite painting.

And surely someone from that crowd would have called him simply Morse, or even Pagan….

Not _Constable_ Morse…

The young woman was watching him, bemused, and then, there _was_ something familiar about her immense blue eyes, magnified all the more by her even more immense white, oddly square-shaped glasses.

“It’s Bettina,” the young woman said. “Bettina Pettybon. Don’t you remember? We met at the television studios.”

“Ah,” Morse said. “Yes. Miss Pettybon.”

He knew the surprise must be clear in his face, but who could blame him? This utter bacchanalia of a party would have been the very last place he would ever have expected to find her….

“Fancy meeting you here…..” he said.

She smiled then, beaming up at him.

“I have you to thank for that,” she said.

“Really?” Morse replied.

It was difficult to believe that someone might be _thankful_ to be here, but all right.

“That day at the studios…..” she said, tentatively. “I could see it, in your face. In the way you looked at me. There was some part of me, all along, that knew how wrong it was, I suppose. How Mummy..... But when I saw the look in your face, it’s as if I saw myself in an utterly different light. And I started thinking…”

And here a trace of buried pride rose into her voice.

“All of Mummy’s appearances, the interviews, the press conferences, the Keep Britain Decent rallies—I organized all of that, did you know? All of them. Mummy did all the talking, of course, but it was me, her dutiful little shadow carrying the clipboard, who did all of the real, grunt work, who put all of that together.”

“Really?” Morse asked. 

“Mmmmm. Even down to keeping tabs on how many “bloodies” might be dropped in the course of a television programme,” she said, with a hint of a dark laugh. 

“And then,” she said, “as we were going out into the car park that night, she started in again. And I was fuming, I didn’t think I could bear to listen to her vitriol for another minute. We had a terrible row. And when I looked up, I saw Nick following Ralph Spender, out to their car, looking just as miserable as I felt.”

Morse startled at the familiar name and stole a glance up at the stage. He hadn’t recognized them amidst the revolving circles of light, but it was, indeed, The Wildwood who had been playing the party. He had quite forgotten that Bix had booked them for the night.

“So I walked over and asked him for a job, told him all I’ve done for Mummy. And he said ….” 

And here, she looked down and tucked her hair behind her ear. 

“Well, later he said, it made him feel brave, seeing me stand up to Mummy. So he sacked Spender and offered me the job.” 

She looked up then, and her round face was radiant with happiness.

“Band manager,” Morse said. “Really? Well, congratulations.”

She nodded, still smiling.

“If there’s any song you’d like to hear, just let me know, and I’ll pass it along to the band,” she said.

“Well,” Morse replied. “Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor might make for a welcome change.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Lacrimosa,” Morse said. “Mozart’s Requieum in D Minor.”

He had been joking, but she wrote the words down on her clipboard, anyway.

Why was it that people never could tell when he was joking?

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

She reached up and gave him a swift kiss on the cheek, and then she was bustling off, back towards the stage, brisk purpose sharp in every step.

Morse watched her as she went.

Everyone seemed so sure of themselves. And how could they be so certain?

One conversation, one row in a car park, and their fates seemed to fall into place before them, much like a deck of Tarot cards, fanned out on a table, held in Mrs. Chattox’s deft and wizened hands.

His own path had gone so badly wrong, plunging away under his feet on a simple cold February morning, that Morse could scarcely fathom it, could not begin to understand their self-assurance.

If only there was someone he could talk to, someone with some insights, who knew something about life.

And then, there was a tap on his shoulder.

Morse spun around at once, his heart jumping at the sudden touch—only to find it was Fancy standing there behind him, looking fit to burst.

“Morse,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you. I’ve just had a brilliant idea.”

“Really?” Morse asked, trying his best to keep the doubt from his voice.

“Yeah,” he said. 

Then, the brightness in his face faded for a moment, and suddenly, he was looking rather sheepish.

“Oh. But by the way. It’s ok if I tell Shirl, isn’t it? All you’ve told me?”

“I suppose so,” Morse sighed. “And anyway, haven’t you already?”

“Well,” Fancy said. “Yeah.”

Morse snorted.

“But Morse. I was thinking. ‘Meet me in the garden for tea?’ Maybe it’s a code, like I was saying.”

Morse said nothing, only looked down at Fancy with a pitying touch of asperity. Of course, it must mean something else. He had five of six pages in his notebook, right now, right in his pocket, devoted to playing around with the letters, trying to work the puzzle out. 

“I was thinking. Maybe it’s not _for tea._ Maybe it’s four “t.” As in four _t_ s.

“All right,” Morse said, doubtfully.

“Maybe it’s a reference to some rendezvous point, to a garden with four _t_ ’s in its name. I’ve looked at a map of Oxford, and I’ve found a few possibilities.”

Morse resisted the impulse to roll his eyes.

It was just what one might expect from Fancy.

A deciphering key as sophisticated as a word game that one might find on the back of a children’s cereal box.

The best course would be to protect Fancy from himself.

“You didn’t tell Trewlove about this, did you?” he asked, diplomatically.

“Yeah.”

Morse sighed. If only Fancy had come to him first, he might have spared him some embarrassment.

“And what did she say?” he asked.

“She said that it very well might be the case. That if it were a message given over the telephone, it might well have been something rather spur of the moment, tossed out on the main chance. That it need only be something designed to sound innocent enough to anyone who might be listening in—that it needn’t necessarily be anything particularly Byzantine. She said, ‘the most important thing about coded language is, for the other party to be able to decipher it.’” 

For the second time in the course of half an hour, Morse felt his face flush.

It felt as if Trewlove’s final words had been crafted just for him, as if she had sent him her own sort of coded message, through Fancy. It was as if she could see him from wherever she was, right now, from clear across the party—as if she could see clear through his pocket—all the way to the pages and pages of failed attempts at cracking the code scribbled in his notebook there.

And somehow, it seemed to signify something else as well. Morse had noticed it, of late, something different in the dynamic of their little trio of outsiders—as if Trewlove’s allegiance had shifted slightly. Somewhere along the line, she had stopped meeting his eyes whenever he felt tempted to roll them behind Fancy’s back, impatient with some fresh display of idiocy. It was as if somewhere along the line, she had decided to take Fancy seriously.

Difficult to imagine why.

Unless it was ..... 

But whatever the reason, Morse had enough respect for Trewlove’s opinion, that it seemed to cast all even further into doubt.

Maybe he _was_ making it all too Byzantine.

Perhaps Thursday had been right, all along.

The long-ago, hastily covered-up accident at the plant, Laxman’s disappearance, Ellsworth’s death, might well be three separate cases. Perhaps it was all in his head, that feeling that they must be connected. Perhaps it was only the workings of his overwrought mind that insisted on weaving them all together.

A waiter sailed by with a tray laden with glasses of champagne filled with light-catching bubbles rising to the surface, and Fancy slipped two of them into his steady hands.

“Well,” he said. “Better get back to Shirl.”

“Right,” Morse said, barely registering what Fancy had just said, even after he had turned to go. “Right.”

And it was little wonder that he couldn’t think in such a place. Above the din of conversation, the grinding guitars of the band, he could barely even hear the sound of his own thoughts, and they—restless with the lack of attending to—had begun to beat with wings all the more insistent, like a jar full of moths struggling to escape, the flurry of them humming along at the edges of his mind.

Morse rubbed a hand over his face and spun around, ready to head off for the bar. What he needed was a drink… and not a delicate glass flute of champagne, either, but a proper one.

But he had time enough to take only a few steps in that direction when a tremble of soft and halting notes fell over the room like a shower of rain, causing a hush to fall over the house as everyone stopped to listen, arrested by the sudden change in the tempo, the almost celestial shift in the air.

Morse glanced up at the stage, where Nick Wilding stood alone under a single spotlight behind his electric keyboard. He had done something to it, adjusted it somehow, so that it sounded much more like a piano, gentle and as clear as water, as his hands rippled amongst the keys, striking up the first hesitant notes of “Lachrimosa.”

Wilding was looking out into the crowd from beneath the brim of his jauntily-tipped purple fedora, and as soon as his gas-fire blue eyes met Morse’s own, Morse saw in them a trace of gratitude. It was clear he was as happy to have shed Spender’s tyranny as Bettina was at having escaped her mother’s. 

Morse might have nodded in acknowledgment of his silent thanks, but, instead, he found it was all he could do but to listen, dumbfounded by the hypnotic swerve of the music. A smirk appeared at the corner of Wilding’s mouth, then, as if he was quite pleased with himself, as if he knew he had failed to meet Morse’s low expectations.

And Morse had to admit it, he was good, actually. The first notes sounded as bell-like as rivulets of water on a window pane, and then grew bolder and bolder, ascending into a rise, rise, rise, and then falling into a swirling and hypnotic dissolution before beginning again. 

For a long while, Morse simply stood and listened, until his heartbeat began to swell with the steady progression of the song, and then—even though he didn’t check his watch—he somehow knew he had arrived at his appointed hour. And so he slipped from the stilled crowds and out through the garden doors.

Outside, in the velvet darkness, the air was cool and crisp, and although the music had softened to a whisper, it followed along with him still, even as it was joined by a trilling choir of frogs.

He meandered down along a path that led past a Tuscan patio, and not even the uncannily familiar voices of the pyrotechnics men, dressed in heavy beige work suits, could slow his steps, break his reverie, disturb his burgeoning resolve.

“I say, I think we ought to save those gold chrysanthemums for the finale, old boy.”

“Quite.”

Morse snorted softly to himself.

Bixby’s _‘people’_ were on it, were they?

It did not come as any great revelation—as it once might have done—to discover that it was Louis and Singleton assisting Bixby with his plan. Although, he rather thought they would be surprised to hear themselves referred to by Bixby as his “people.” Doubtless, they thought it was the other way around; doubtless, they would have said that they were in charge, that Bixby was working for them.

_“We have a man on it, providing us the perfect cover.”_

Still, eight eyes were better than four, and, as intelligence agents, they would have had some training in explosives, presumably.

Or so one might hope.

And then Morse quickened his pace, breathing deep the burning night air.

Because, of course, nothing would happen. Not on a charmed night such as this, not when so many around him were finding their lives falling right into place at last. Sergeant Jakes and Nick Wilding and Bettina Pettybon and Fancy and Trewlove.

He walked on until he came to a grove of trees hung with softly glowing paper lanterns and strung with fairy lights twinkling overhead beneath the scatter of stars. By the time he came at last to a row of Victorian glass greenhouses, Tony was already there, waiting for him, looking delightfully out-of-place as he leaned against a solitary tree, the bright ember of the tip of his cigarette visible in the darkness.

Tony must have realized how improbable he looked, all elegant cuffs and tailored lines, in this out-of-the way spot, out amidst the shadowed glass and overgrown rose bushes, because, as Morse approached, he pulled his cigarette away and smiled one of his quintessential Tony smiles, tinged with a trace of irony.

“Fancy meeting you here,” he said.

“Hmmmmm,” Morse said.

And then Morse swallowed.

“Tony. I need to ask you something.”

“So you said,” Tony replied. A faint crease formed between his brows, then, as he took a careful drag on his cigarette, watching him expectantly.

And how could Morse blame him?

It was he who had drug him out here, out to this sodden and forlorn and muddy spot, beset by choirs of frogs and toads, under the pretext that he had wanted to speak with him.

But now that he was standing here, Morse felt as if he were underwater, as if he was back in his old recurring nightmare, the one in which he had managed to reach a telephone, to dial Tony’s number, only to find that he could not speak.

“Endeavour?” Tony prompted.

Tony was regarding him uncertainly, seemingly wary at having used the name. Morse would have thought that it might have been odd hearing it, that it would have taken some getting used to, but in that moment, it felt as if the name grounded him, gave him some solid place to stand.

What had Nick Wilding said, that day at the studios?

_I hope there’s somebody who knows your real name?_

“Tony,” Morse said. “I … I need to ask….”

“Yes?”

Morse looked down, scrubbed up the waves at the back of his nape. It was a simple enough question. One that should be easily enough managed.

So why was it so difficult? 

“You …. you do like concerts. Don’t you?”

A strain of tension that Morse had not even realized Tony had been holding there, in the fine and angular lines of his face, dissipated then, and Tony smiled, the old gleam of careless laughter back in his eyes again.

_“What?”_ he asked.

The word seemed to burst out of him in a breath of laughter.

“Good Lord. You had me thinking you wanted us to run off and join the foreign legion.”

“Well,” Morse persisted. “Do you?”

“Join the foreign legion? I should say not.”

“No,” Morse said. “I mean … do you like it? Going to concerts?”

Tony’s smiled deepened, and of course, he had known that that was what Morse had meant the first time. He had been making a joke, and Morse had missed it.

“Yes, of course,” he said. “Of course, I do. It’s nice. You get so swept away in it.”

But Morse shook his head.

“But do _you_ like to go. That’s what I’m asking.” 

“Yes,” Tony said, more emphatically. “Far better than I enjoyed our first date, that’s for certain.”

“Hmmmm?” Morse asked, furrowing his brow in confusion.

Had they had such a thing?

“What was that?” Morse asked.

“That bloody perfume factory tour,” Tony said. “For a moment there, I didn’t think I would make it out of that gift shop full of eager matrons with my honor intact.”

“Ah,” Morse said.

The music was still sounding in his head, and then, between the notes, he heard something else there, something that seemed to make everything flip.

If Tony had indeed been indulging him, if it was true that their relationship had been somewhat one-sided, then perhaps it was his fault, had been his fault, all along.

He had asked Tony to take him to that perfume factory only so that he could find a way to break into Sebastian Fenix’s offices. It hadn’t been their first date, really, but rather the beginnings of his first case.

“Endeavour?” Tony asked, holding a hand up to cup his face.

Morse said nothing, only stood, leaning into the touch, as a new epiphany sent him reeling, winging its way through his thoughts.

Maybe he just needed …. practice.

Couldn’t people learn what did not come naturally?

Jakes certainly didn’t know the first thing about being a cowboy. Whatever it was, exactly, that they did.

Clean air. A new start, he had said.

Morse was terrible at this, he was awful, he was awkward as hell, but maybe he could learn to do better.

Strange had tried to give him some tips, on the night of their double date at the pub. Perhaps he might ask him more about it. Or perhaps he might ask Jakes or Fancy or Joan or Thursday … perhaps he might learn the trick of it ... of how the thing was done.

They made it all look so easy.

Endeavour, Tony had called him. And perhaps that was just what he needed… some space in which to be Endeavour ... to learn who he was, the man who had always eluded his own name.

“Constable Morse!” 

Tony’s hand flew away from his face, even as Morse spun around on the spot.

And what could possibly be happening now? Who could be pursuing him, even out here?

“What?” Morse snapped.

Before him, Thomas Maxwell stood blinking, boyish and uncertain, obviously intimidated by Morse’s sharp tone.

“Constable Morse. I thought I recognized you. It’s Maxwell. From Lovelace College. You came by the other day.” 

Morse nodded in acknowledgment. He remembered him—of course he remembered him—not only had they met twice now, but he had been watching him on stage for days during the chess tournament, after all.

“You have to help me. Please.”

“What is it?” Morse asked. “What’s happened?”

“It’s Yulia. We planned to meet out here at half ten. But she never showed. I’ve been looking for her everywhere. And.... She’s gone.”

“Surely, she must be somewhere about,” Morse said, trying to reassure the frantic young man. The place was a maze, after all. The sort of place.....

The sort of place from which a person might vanish, without a trace.... 

“No,” Maxwell said. “I’ve searched and I’ve searched. It’s as if she’s completely disappeared.” 

Later, much later, as Morse was running across the shadowed lawns of Lovelace College, a briefcase full of bank notes in his hand, he would blame himself, consider it an ill-omen that he had chosen such a song for the party... a song about mourning, about death, about a rebirth that he did not believe in. 

But in that moment, it was all that he could do to simply stand there, wondering if he would ever catch up, or if he was destined always to find himself two steps behind. 


	16. Chapter 16

Thursday stood against the wall of a drawing room set with a circle of ivory silk sofas striped with gold, watching as two officers from Surveillance set up the phone tap and recording equipment on a low, oval table.

Then, his dark eyes narrowed, trailing to where Morse sat perched on the edge of one of the couches. For a long moment, he considered him, as the lad leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped tightly before him.

Thursday knew what Morse must be thinking. The disappearance of Yulia Petrovna Vaganova from the tournament reception did, by all accounts, bear some similarities to his own disappearance more than seven years ago.

There one minute, gone the next.

And WPC Trewlove’s report that a bottle of chloroform had recently been stolen from a dentist’s office in Summerton did little to ease the tension in Morse’s face, the translucent tautness in the knuckles of his joined hands.

It was same manner in which he himself had been abducted twice over—first by Professor Clive Durrell and later by Mason Gull, right from Thursday’s own home.

Thursday felt a surge of hot anger, then, twisting low in his gut, at the memory of finding that chemical-sweet scented handkerchief on the floor of Morse’s room, at the memory of that realization that the walls he had taken such pains to build up—both literally and figuratively—to keep his family safe, had been breached.

He shifted his weight then, pushing the thought away. The way through this was to keep a cool head.

He wished he could tell Morse that. If the room weren’t so full of people—Dempsey and Jakes and the surveillance officers and Mr. Bright, and Maxwell and Updike, and Donn and Joss Bixby—he might very well have done just that.

But instead, all he could do was to watch as Morse leaned forward, clearly restless, staring at the telephone before him as if willing it to ring, his stubborn jaw set in a way that was almost painful to look upon.

It was as if, after all of this time, the lad was coming unglued, unravelling piece by piece by piece.

The worst of it was, if Thursday felt like being honest with himself, he had known it for a long while now, had seen that Morse had not quite been himself ever since that day at Lovelace College, when they had first gone out to see JCN, to get the lay of the land, so to speak, before the first chess match.

_“Of course, the chess tournament is just a bit of song and dance. The important thing is to get the public’s confidence up,” Dr. Ellsworth had said._

_“And why is that?” Morse asked._

_“Because of the new system, the one that will run the Bramford Power Station, saving all operations from any chance of human error,” the old don replied._

_“The nuclear station? Surely you’re not going to trust a machine to the entirety of that?”_

_“There will be always be a human failsafe on standby,” Dr. Ellsworth assured him. “Largely unnecessary, though. You wouldn’t have heard, of course, of the Dartmouth Conference, held back in ‘56. We’re breaking new ground every day. Artificial Intelligence will be the wave of the future.”_

_“I certainly have heard of it,” Morse replied, tartly. “And I know that the researchers there greatly underestimated how much data and computing power a machine would need to solve real world problems. Suppose, at your power plant, that multiple problems were to arise simultaneously?”_

_“How can a machine innovate? Think outside the box, think under pressure?” Morse continued, a slight strain of desperation rising into his low and mournful voice. “You can feed it all the information on music in the world, but a computer can never write you a symphony.”_

_“Not quite yet, perhaps,” Dr. Ellsworth conceded. “But one day, we feel, it will be able to do just that.”_

_“Mmmmmm,” Morse hummed, evidently unconvinced._

_But as his eyes roved over the wall of dials and lights, he seemed to pale, his face falling into lines of defeat, and Thursday knew suddenly, with a terrible clarity, just what Morse must be thinking._

_If Clive Durrell had had such a machine, would he have needed Morse?_

_Such was Morse’s need to feel useful, it must have been a horror to him to realize—with this new and unrelenting freshness—just what a waste it all had been._

_Morse was the sort who had to feel he had been valuable to someone._

_Even if only to a demented megalomaniac._

_  
“All right, Morse?" Thursday asked._

_Morse swallowed and seemed to recover himself._

_“Yes,” he said._

_But the big eyes remained trained on the wall of vacuum tubes and reels of tape._

_And Thursday knew, deep in his gut, that Morse wasn't looking at JCN, Lovelace College’s new pride and joy._

_That he wasn’t looking at any promise of a miraculous future._

_Thursday knew he was looking deep into the past._

_At nothing more or less than five lost years._

Ever since that day, it felt as if Morse had done little but dwell on it all—first brooding over this JCN business, and then going round and round over that Laxman case.

The case of another man who had been missing for five years.

Much like the disappearance of Dr. Vaganova, the parallels between Morse’s and Laxman’s cases were clear, and Thursday should have seen them right away, should have known, even then, that it was just the sort of thing that might capture Morse’s imagination.

Because, sure enough, Morse kept worrying with it, like a loose thread in a garment, almost obsessive over it. When Morse had pulled him aside at Lovelace College the morning after Ellsworth’s body had been found out on the banks of the Cherwell, Thursday wasn’t all that surprised that Morse should try to tie the two cases together by whatever string he could find— even if it was only a pattern he had been told of, found in a deck of Tarot cards.

Two cases, five years apart, hardly a pattern make, Thursday had told him. Even if they did both bear some connection to Bramford, the similarities began and ended there, and even Morse, in trying to put some theory together, had been forced to fall back on a hundred _maybes_ and _what ifs._

Thursday had told Morse to put the whole thing out of his mind. Whatever might be at the heart of the matter, it was Special Branch’s bailiwick now. Morse would be better off letting it all recede into the rearview mirror, right along with whatever memories the case seemed to dredge up within him.

But trying to divert Morse from a puzzle that had caught his fancy was like trying to get a bone away from a dog. At dinner, he sat in his chair in the corner, lapsing into long and sour silences, his gaze unfocused, utterly preoccupied.

It was as if they were going backwards.

Or even beyond backwards, really.

On the day after the mass shooting at Lonsdale College, when Sergeant Jakes had found the small white room with walls covered with back-slant numbers hidden away in Clive Durrell’s house, Thursday had raced home to Win, fearful of what he had done, of what damaged sort of man it was exactly who he had left in her care—only to find Morse working quietly in the garden.

He had told Morse what he knew, and what he guessed, and Morse had turned to him, leaned his forehead against his shoulder, and, after a space of silence, had written for him his name. 

Thursday snorted softly at the memory. 

Or his surname, anyway.

But when Morse had handed him back that notebook, it had been with eyes full of a rare trust, the likes of which Thursday had seldom seen. 

A trust that, since then, had been fraying steadily around the edges.

Maybe Thursday needn’t have pushed Morse so hard about this Tony business. Maybe it had been a cheap shot, the way he had left him to find his own way into the nick on the morning of the final chess match, hell-bent on making his point.

Maybe he would have done better to have stepped back. If Morse felt Donn was someone he could rely on, could feel comfortable around, after having lived in such isolation for so long, then so be it.

Eventually, when he got a bit steadier on his feet, he’d move on, find some nice girl to settle down with.

Same with Joan, really. She’d tire of it, soon enough, working at that record store, standing on her feet all day. One day some young postgrad would come in, dressed in a wool coat and a scarf striped with his college’s colors, and the next thing you knew, Thursday would be walking her down the aisle.

And soon, Sam, too, would start talking sense.

Lately, it seemed, it had been nothing but the Army with him. But what was the point of that? Why had he, Thursday, worked so hard to get his family out of the Smoke, out to a quiet college town with good schools and green lawns and clean air, just to have his son follow in his old man’s footsteps?

Sam would soon see it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, the Army. The bugle calls and the endless routine of drills and chow hall and the naming of parts. He’d be back as soon as his first two-year tour was up, find an office job where he’d wear a suit and tie every day. Just like Thursday had always known that he would.

If it was true that he’d been hard on them, it was for their own good.

They’d see that, one day.

If that “one day,” ever got the chance to dawn, that is.

Because it was hard not to see it, all of the ramifications of this case…

A Soviet researcher abducted during what was essentially meant to be a tentative gesture of friendship, a diplomatic exchange of thoughts and ideas?

Christ.

Hard to believe that just a week ago, they had all been so worked up about the truth of that stolen Romanov jewel getting out, getting into the papers.

The consequences of this turn of events must needs be all the graver.

And, potentially, far deadlier.

One of the surveillance officers plugged in the final connection, and the two men sat back in their chairs, their headphones in place, ready for the call.

Across the room, their host, Joss Bixby, hovered in the doorway, visible really only as a silhouette, a halo of red light glowing from the room behind him. Mr. Bright and Mr. Dempsey stood side by side, their faces grim, like two pieces on a chessboard awaiting their next move, while Anthony Donn stood in a corner beside an ornate gilt floor lamp, the blue curl of his cigarette smoke just visible in its light.

Maxwell, Updike and Gredenko—the last to have seen Dr. Vaganova—sat on one of the couches, with the head of the Soviet delegation, Zosimov, standing unsmiling behind them.

Morse and Jakes, meanwhile, occupied the striped silken sofa beside them, as different from one another as night and day in looks and in temperament, but united in their tense and wary posture.

There was nothing else to do, but to wait.

They sat, and no one said a word. Not even Bixby, who at first had fallen over himself in his glib and charming way, finding a room for them to set up in.

Maxwell rubbed a hand over his face, his expression utterly bereft. And still, no one spoke.

The minutes ticked on, but Thursday remained still in his place by the wall. He was used to this sort of thing, after all. He had waited before.

In trenches. On stake-outs.

And so he’d wait on. Even with so much riding on the next hour.

The life of a young woman hung in the balance.

And possibly the balance of peace, the fate of the world, along with her.

The shrill ring of the telephone cut through the air like an electric shock, charging the room with an even sharper edge of tension, and still Thursday did not so much as blink, even as one of the surveillance men leaned forward and flipped a switch, so that the two large reels of tape on the face of the machine began steadily to revolve.

The man adjusted his headphones, and then he nodded to Dempsey, who—tight-lipped, with eyes like two points of steel behind his horn-rimmed glasses—reached down to pick up the receiver.

“Dempsey.”

An oddly disembodied voice came over the receiver, magnified for all the room to hear.

“I want to speak to Constable Morse.”

The heavy silence in the air curdled at the edges, into a thing almost viscous to the touch, and Thursday finally moved from his place by the wall, as all of the men in the room turned to look at one another.

What was this?

As it was, the man on the other end of the telephone line was speaking to a Special Branch agent. A defender of the realm, authorized to act on behalf of the crown.

Whereas Morse was naught but a DC of only a few months’ standing. Hardly the highest-ranking officer in the room.

Morse, too, seemed puzzled, the confusion clear on his face.

Whatever he had been up to—and Thursday was sure now it had been something—even Morse hadn’t seen this coming.

Dempsey looked to Morse, considering, and then held out the receiver towards him. Morse rose to take it, and, as he stood, one of the surveillance men gestured to him, making a clockwise motion with a cupped hand, indicating to Morse that he should keep the man on the other end of the line talking for as long as possible.

Morse nodded, and, slowly, raised the receiver to his face.

“Morse.”

“Have you all been having a fine time at the party, drinking and dancing and playing roulette?” the voice asked. “While in the meanwhile, you’ve have been playing Russian roulette with the world? Careless. So careless. That’s what all of you sort are. Careless.”

“What is it that you want?” Morse asked.

“Well. I suppose I have your careful attention now. Now you’ll have to listen. Now it’s my turn to air my grievances.”

Morse looked up sharply at that, but not towards him or to Jakes, nor even to Mr. Bright or to Dempsey, but, strangely enough, in the direction of Joss Bixby.

“If you want to see Dr. Vaganova again,” the voice went on, “you’ll put 100,000 pounds in used, unmarked notes of small denomination in a dark holdall. Come to the phone box on Norham Gardens Road at 4 a.m. Come alone and on foot. No press.”

Morse raised his eyebrows. On that they could all agree. 

“If I see anyone else there. The deal’s off, and she’s dead.”

The surveillance man sitting by the recorder moved towards the edge of his seat, gesturing once more for Morse to keep the man talking.

“How do I know you’ll do as you say?” Morse asked, his low and rounded voice sounding even more painstakingly precise than usual. “How do I know she’s even alive?” 

At that, Thomas Maxwell suddenly sprang up from the adjacent sofa, grabbing the receiver from out of Morse’s hand and pressing it to his mouth.

”Don’t hurt her!” he cried. ”Please! Don’t hurt her!”

His colleague, Scott Updike, swallowed and looked away, an oddly sympathetic expression on his typically dispassionate face, while Gredenko rose to his feet, talking the young man by the shoulder and giving it a empathetic shake, encouraging him to surrender the phone back to Morse.

“You’re a policeman,” the voice said. “Think of this as an open and shut case. If you follow my instructions, you’ll see her again. If you don’t, she dies. Speak to the press, she dies.”

“Oh, my God,” Maxwell sobbed.

There was an audible click, as heavy as a hammer fall, and Morse looked to the man by the recorder, who slowly, regretfully, shook his head.

Morse’s thin shoulders slumped as he returned the receiver to its perch, while Dempsey simply stared into the mid-distance, as if at some unseen point. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and his glasses from his face, and then began polishing the lenses in deliberate and meticulous circles.

“Right,” he said. “Right.”

Then, he nodded towards Mr. Bright.

“We’ll need one of your men on it.”

It felt almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy. It was just as Thursday had tried to tell Morse, that day by the lily pond at Lovelace College.

Their sort was all too often expendable enough as it was, weren’t they? 

It would be their job to see done right by, but Thursday didn’t doubt that Special Branch would be keeping an eye on the proceedings as well. They would be on watch, but at a safe distance.

Wasn’t as if they could afford to let one of their own go the same way as Miss Vaganova now, was it? 

Whereas if the man on the other end of the line got ahold of one of Oxford’s finest, why .... a meat and two veg copper wouldn’t be able to tell him anything important, anything classified, even if he wanted to, even under duress. 

“Thursday,” Mr. Bright said, evenly. 

“All right, Sergeant Jakes,” Thursday said. “I’ll take you back to your flat.”

Plenty of time till four. And this job sure as hell wasn’t the sort of thing the sergeant could easily pull in that stiff, ill-fitting suit borrowed from an old storage closet in the locker room of the nick.

“What?” Morse asked.

“Morse,” Thursday replied. “There’s no saying how it might go.”

“Dangerous you mean?”

“Potentially.”

Morse’s gaze flitted towards Jakes for a moment, as if he were deliberating something.

“Job for a single man, I would have thought,” he said. “Or at least ... one with no dependents.”

Jakes grimaced, leaving Thursday to reevaluate.

Well. 

The sergeant certainly kept that a secret.

Sudden.

But that’s the way it goes sometimes.

He hoped he was planning to do right by the girl, whoever she was. He’d be having a little chat with him, once all this was over. 

Morse’s eyes, in the meanwhile, were wavering over his face, and he must have read Thursday’s understanding there, because suddenly, he looked as if he was having second thoughts, as if he felt sheepish about having spilled all of Jakes’ personal business to one and all.

“And besides,” Morse said, “he … he asked for me, didn’t he? It must be someone who knows me ... or, at least, who knows who I am….”

“All right, Constable,” Thursday said, relenting. 

Dempsey nodded once, curtly in agreement.

“It’s all my fault,” Maxwell said, his voice cracking as he buried his face in his hands. “I should never have asked her to meet me out there.”

Thursday sighed.

They had been over all that before.

No plan is fool-proof.

If it had been Thursday’s call, this party would not have gone on at all, not after the death of Dr. Ellsworth.

Laxman’s disappearance and Ellsworth’s death might not be connected, but he would bet his fat arse that Dr. Ellsworth’s case and Dr. Vaganova’s was.

If Special Branch hadn’t insisted on that lie of a “heart attack,” if they had not been so determined for all to go on as if there was nothing suspicious about Ellsworth’s death, most likely this never would have happened.

Thursday never could understand that sort. 

So set on sweeping everything under the carpet, on keeping up appearances no matter what the cost. Of not accepting the truth of what was there, right before their faces.

If he had had any say-so in the matter, he would have told them that going on with the reception, carrying on with the illusion that all was well, was a terrible idea. 

Bixby’s grand pile on Lake Silence was a security nightmare, a labyrinth of tricky lighting, a confusion of crowds, a maze of rooms and secret doors.

And the lantern-lit and path out to the greenhouses, according to their host, was a regular little lovers’ lane, shadowed and clandestine, well-hidden by shrubbery from view of house. 

Hang on.

What the hell had Morse been doing out there?

“In the meantime, Mr. Bright said, “we’ll continue our inquires amongst the guests and our survey of the perimeter of the grounds. Mr. Bixby, I’ll be requiring your assistance for the next few hours.”

“What’s that, old man?” Bixby asked, from his place by the door.

Thursday couldn’t quite make out Bixby’s features, poised, as he was, in the glow of the red party lights, but his very frame seemed to be vibrating with some frenetic energy, percolating with impatience at being called upon to help in the case.

The case, of a young woman, mind you, who had disappeared right from his very home ... who might possibly be in grave danger. 

It was incredible how thoughtless this Lake Silence set could be, how shallow.

Did nothing matter to the man, other than his fine suits and finer champagne? His card games and his parties?

“Is there some trouble,” Mr. Bixby?” Thursday asked sharply. “Do you have some place you need to be?”

Bixby hesitated. 

“Of course not, old man,” he said.

Then he shrugged.

“Not every party can be a roaring success, I suppose. Just have to chalk it up to the luck of the draw.”

And although Thursday could not see their host’s features clearly in the odd, magician's trick-light, he could see the outline of his face as he turned towards Morse, and then he could almost _feel_ it, the intensity and the intent with which he looked at him.

Oh, Christ.

Wasn’t he the man who had tried to give Morse that sporty little red car, two years ago?

The place wasn't only a labyrinth.

It was a ruddy minefield.

Buggar it, if they had time for this.

“Let’s get a move on,” Thursday said, and then he took Morse by the shoulder and, before he even had a chance to cast one last look behind him, Thursday steered him out of the door.

***

“Come home, safe,” Win said.

“Righto,” Thursday replied.

She smiled wanly, straightening the lapels of his coat. She must have known something was desperately amiss for them to be heading off at this ungodly hour, but, after all of these years, she knew not to ask.

She patted Morse on the shoulder, then, brushing his tweed blazer as if to smarten him up a bit, and then the pair of them went out of the house, down the steps, and into the darkened drive, out to where Jakes was waiting behind the wheel of the black Jag, drumming his thumbs impatiently on the steering wheel.

Thursday understood that Morse had meant to spare Jakes the danger of it, this job, but he also understood that Jakes was the sort of man who liked to be in control. He knew that the sergeant would one hundred-fold prefer to be working the assignment himself than to be the one stuck behind the wheel, and his discontent with his role was clear on his face.

“What’s this rubbish?” Jakes snapped, as soon as he and Morse got into the car, smacking the top of the dashboard with his hand. 

Thursday looked over from his place in the passenger’s seat to find that a Tarot card depicting a man lying face down, a torrent of swords driven hard into his back, had been cellotaped to the leather dash.

“Leave it,” Morse said. “I need that.”

Jakes and Thursday exchanged looks, as surprised at Morse’s words as by his tone of command.

“What do you want this for?” Thursday asked.

“For when it’s Fancy’s turn to listen to the radio. To remind myself that there are far worse fates.”

Jakes raised a heavy eyebrow as he threw the car into reverse and backed out of the drive, the edginess in his face flown, replaced by open bemusement, as if he expected little else from Morse. But Thursday spun around in his seat, pushed past all endurance.

He’d heard just about enough of that over the past two year.

“What have I told the pair of you about squabbling over the radio?” he rumbled.

Morse looked at him through hooded eyes and then—right in front of his face, just as insolent as you please—he pulled a handful of sweets from his pocket and started to unwrap one with a far greater amount of crinkling and crackling than what seemed strictly necessary, just as if he had not spoken.

“Where did you get those?” Jakes asked.

“I took them from a dish in Bixby’s office.”

Jakes snorted, and Thursday understood at once just why.

When had Morse ever been a one for sweets? He had taken the damned things, most likely, only because they were free. He’d always been a bit of a tightwad, never the first to buy a round. But lately, he’d been hoarding like a regular magpie.

What? Was he worried about going without? When had he or Win ever begrudged him anything? Hadn't he always provided enough for all of them?

“Wouldn’t have had you for a sweet tooth,” Jakes asked. “What is it? Calm the nerves?”

“Something like that,” Morse said, vaguely. 

“Just follow whatever instructions he gives you, all right? Don’t try anything clever. It’s this young woman’s life we’re talking about.”

Morse widened his eyes at him, casting him a look of cold asperity. 

“Yes,” he said. “I know.”

Jakes turned the wheel, rounding a corner and pulling out onto the main road, and, as the black Jag hummed on into the darkness, the three of them fell into a tense and uneasy silence. After about a quarter of an hour, they came at last to the great brick and stone buildings adorned with steep points and gothic towers that lined Norham Gardens Road. 

Jakes pulled up to the side of the kerb about fifty feet from the appointed spot, and Morse swung himself out of the car, slamming the door behind him without so much as a look back, as if he were shaking the dust off his feet behind him.

Thursday watched him as he walked down the pavement, and it struck him that it wasn’t the worst idea, sending Morse.

He knew what he was on about, Morse. And in his patterned jumper and tweed blazer, he thoroughly looked it, the part of the academic. Walking down the pavement, swinging the briefcase provided by Dempsey along, he looked like nothing more than an eccentric young don eager to start the day, striding along in the indigo predawn, making his way in to his rooms.

There was nothing about him that might stand out, cause even the slightest degree of suspicion.

Other than the fact, of course, that a black Jag was trundling down the road, keeping a short and measured distance just behind him.

Eh, who was he kidding?

They looked suspicious as hell. 

Through narrowed eyes, Thursday watched as Morse stepped into the red call box. The lad stood there for a moment under the call box light, a beacon of slim shoulders and fiery, wavy hair in the darkness, and then he startled and picked up the receiver, pressing it hard against his ear.

He listened for a minute, his hunched right shoulder holding the phone as he wrote on a pad on the call box shelf. Then, he hung up the phone and slipped open the call box door.

And then he was running.

Thursday waited for only about ten seconds before he half-leapt out of the car. He walked steadily up to the call box, keeping his steps even as they sounded in the surrounding hush, as if he had no other intent than to make a simple call.

He slid the painted red door open and stepped inside, taking hold of the the receiver in a studied pantomime, whilst, at the same time, picking up the pad of paper before him, taking in the words written there in that familiar back-slant hand.

_Lovelace College. Bench by the Cherwell._

Thursday cursed under his breath and slammed the receiver down. He pocketed the pad of paper and stepped out of the box, heading back to the waiting Jag, its engine purring softly in the darkened and deserted street.

_“Lovelace College. Bench by the Cherwell_ is all he says,” Thursday said, tersely, once he got back into the car. “Which one? Must be half a dozen along that way.” 

“Same place where Ellsworth was found, most likely,” Jakes supplied.

“Hmmmmm,” Thursday hummed, grimly, in agreement. “Let’s get over there.”

Jakes threw the car into drive, and, sure enough, once they turned the first corner, there was Morse, running along the pavement, moving in and out of the yellow circles cast by the lampposts onto the glistening street.

Morse rounded onto Parks Road, and still, Jakes followed at a careful distance, rolling smoothly down the shadowed streets. Then, Morse darted down Sherrington, disappearing into a grid of gray stone college buildings, and they lost sight of him for a moment. But then, the sergeant cut down a parallel side-street, and they turned the corner just in time to see Morse emerge back onto the main road.

And still, Morse was running, just as if his life depended on it.

Or, more likely, as if a young woman’s life depended on it. 

From the way Morse was flying along, gangly and coltish, Thursday couldn’t help but wonder at the details of the message given to him. Perhaps the man on the line had told Morse that he needed to be swift, that he needed to meet him by a certain time at the rendezvous spot, to ensure that Morse had no time to plan anything or to alert anyone as to his final destination.

It must have certainly been so, because, in the next moment, it seemed as if Morse had redoubled his pace, his upper body held still, but his feet pounding, his wavy hair springing with each step, briefly fiery as he passed under a streetlamp.

They turned, following Morse through a web of roads skirting along the colleges, and then, as they rounded another corner, Morse disappeared once more into a maze of stone gothic buildings and improbable towers.

Jakes hissed and turned the wheel, trundling the Jag down another parallel side street, waiting for Morse to come out on the other side.

Thursday had known it might not be possible to keep Morse in sight at all times, but still, he wasn’t prepared for it, for that punch in his gut, as they continued down the road, finding nothing but an empty stretch of gray pavement before them.

“Where the hell is he?” Thursday asked, through gritted teeth.

Jakes pressed ever so slightly on the gas, lending them just a touch of speed as they rolled slowly and cautiously on, keeping a sharp eye out for Morse. Thursday was sure of it—sure that he would see Morse’s thin figure pop out of the shadows of the huddle of stone buildings at any moment. 

Any moment now....

But there was no flash of red hair or of tweed jacket or of striped jumper.

No Morse to be seen.

Thursday swallowed, fighting hard against a sinking, heavy feeling that had lodged itself tight in his throat. 

Morse was a copper now, he knew what he was doing. Thursday had to believe that.

But, still, it didn’t sit right.

Still, there was something that made Thursday feel just as he had on that day long ago, when Win had sent Morse to Richardson’s for a dozen eggs, and Thursday had retraced his steps, only to find that it was as if Morse had completely disappeared, vanished from right off the pavement. 


	17. Chapter 17

“Where the hell is he?” Thursday rumbled.

“Most likely took some sort of short cut,” Jakes replied evenly, his deep-set eyes focused on the road before them. “We’re right by his old stomping grounds, aren’t we?”

 _“What?”_ Thursday asked.

As if to answer his own question, Thursday ducked his head in further towards the window of the Jag, raising his gaze so that he could take it all in—the great stone buildings and towers that curved along the winding street, the trees lush with leaves that stood hushed and still in the darkness.

So intent had he been on keeping his eyes fast trained on the pavement, searching for some sign of Morse, that Thursday hadn’t noticed that they had followed South Parks Road all the way to where the grounds of Lovelace College ran up adjacent to Lonsdale.

Thursday cursed softly under his breath.

“What was he thinking?” Thursday snapped. “You would have thought he might have realized we might lose track of him, pulling some such stunt.” 

“Doubt he’s thinking of us right now,” Jakes replied, and there was a definite ring of approval in his voice—a rare thing to be found there, really, when he was speaking of Morse.

Thursday shook his head, all the same.

It was no mere accident that the man on the telephone had chosen this labyrinthine part of the city, filled with the twists and turns of old narrow streets. Nor was it any coincidence that he had chosen this particular hour—that haunted hour of the night just before morning, in which the deep shadows seemed to paint everything with the self-same brush, coloring trees and stone buildings and arched gates in the same muted tones, bathing all in the deceptive color of darkness.

Trying to find one small figure in this maze of desolate alleyways and one-ways was like trying to find a needle, even under the best of circumstances.

Jakes took another turn, then, and the Jag’s headlamps swept before them in an illuminating arc, revealing only yet another stretch of damp and empty pavement glistening in the artificial yellow light.

“The Marston Cyclepath runs right along this way, across the fields, sir,” Jakes said. “We can park along the kerb there, and see if we can catch up with him once he’s out in the open. Even if he did cut through somewhere, there’s only one way to the Cherwell, from this point.” 

“Hmmmmm,” Thursday agreed.

Jakes pulled up along the kerb, and, as soon as he put the car into park, taking the keys from the ignition, he tore out of the door and was running across the grass, his dark coat flashing silver-gray for a moment under a lamppost before merging into the gloom.

Thursday, too, sprung out of the car and followed, a good few yards behind, but doing his best to dog his sergeant’s footsteps, all the same.

The man on the telephone had warned Morse against being followed, but…

Buggar that, at this point.

Not as if they had been all that slick, any road.

As he ran, Thursday cast a quick look about, taking in the wide expanse of muted gray-green grass dotted with the dark silhouettes of trees, keeping an eye out for Special Branch as much as for Morse.

He had been so sure they’d be about, ready to stick their oar in when the mood suited.

Jakes, in the meanwhile, kept heading straight on, widening the gap between them, leaving Thursday to run all the harder, redoubling his pace.

He tried his damnedest to keep up with his sergeant, but it was true: the old man wasn’t what he used to be, he supposed, because it wasn’t long before his heart was pounding hard in chest in protest, before he was struggling for breath, gasping in sharp, chilled bursts. 

It had occurred to Thursday, too late, that it had perhaps been a mistake, sending Morse on this job.

If whoever it was who had abducted Dr. Vaganova had an interest in mathematicians and physicists—beyond the money they might bring in for ransom—wasn’t Morse precisely the sort of person he might love to get his hands on?

Was that why Morse had been so singled out, to speak to the man on the telephone?

Thursday had been sure at the time that it could only be because the lad had been up to something, sticking his nose in somewhere where it didn’t belong, but ….

Did the unknown man on the other end of the telephone line know something of Morse’s past? Did he hope to use one brilliant mind as a lure to abduct yet another?

If something _had_ happened to the lad, Thursday would never forgive himself for it, the way they had parted. For the way he had chided him, right in front of Jakes, even as he had gone off to risk his neck.

Even as Thursday ran along into the inky darkness, the image burned bright in his mind: that of Morse slamming the car door shut, seeming to almost shake the dust from his shoes as he stalked off towards the red call box, prickly and full of wounded pride, as if he were well-shot of him.

Morse was a poor policeman—tried Thursday’s patience no end at times.

But he was a good detective.

Inspector material, really.

He should have told him so more often.

If only they could find him, he’d make a point of it.

He’d do well to go easier on all three of them, really.

Win was right.

It was hard, damned painful, letting the kids go, watching them as they struggled.

Why did they have to make things so bloody difficult for themselves?

But that was what he had signed on for, wasn’t it?

And, if he didn’t, he would surely drive all of them away. As he almost already had with Joan. 

As he might now have done with Morse. 

Suddenly, Jakes quickened his pace, spurring Thursday on as if by instinct—and then, his breath caught in his chest, like a dull knife pressed up hard against his sternum. 

Ahead, lying near the bank of the Cherwell, was the still form of a body—and, despite the darkness—Thursday was sure right away that it was Morse. He would have known him anywhere, from his unruly hair alone, distinctly auburn even in that low light, the waves of it undulating in the grass in just the way Morse’s moved, caught up in the first soft breath of the wakening morning air.

Thursday ran on, his footfalls landing all the harder, even as he stole a look about the surrounding fields, eyes sharp for signs of the culprit.

But there was no sign of anyone.

No one was to be seen.

“Morse!” Thursday called out then, drawing up to where his constable lay.

But Morse did not stir; only his hair continued to waft in the gentle wind from off the nearby river. It seemed an ominous sign somehow—the movement of his hair seeming to emphasize by contrast just how utterly still the rest of him lay, sprawled out on his side like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

Thursday dropped down beside him, falling onto his knees, utterly out of breath, and shook him lightly by the shoulder.

“Morse,” he said again.

“The holdall’s gone,” Jakes noted, looking about in the grass.

The sergeant circled around, then, running both hands through his dark, slick-backed hair.

“No sign of the girl. He’s made off with the money, and we’re none the wiser.”

Thursday grimaced in agreement.

Then, he turned his attention back to the prone figure before him.

“Morse?” he asked, shaking his shoulder once more.

Morse seemed to be whole and unharmed, so why wouldn’t he wake? What was wrong with him? Why wouldn’t he answer?

He shook him again, a tad more forcefully.

_“Morse.”_

Morse groaned unhappily, then, and slowly raised a hand to the back of his head.

Thursday snorted.

That answered that question, then.

Someone must have stolen up behind him, knocked him all the way to next week.

Thursday nudged Morse’s tentative hand away with his own broader and surer one, running his fingers through the soft mess of waves, trying to determine the extent of the damage. 

The lad’s hair was getting to be quite a mop, really.

When was the last time he’d had a haircut, anyway? Next thing you know, he’d look like that Nigel Warren, that shaggy vagabond they’d questioned before Division had pulled them back off the Laxman case.

Then, he shook his head, gently chiding himself.

Eh, none of that now.

Hadn’t he not two minutes before sworn to turn over a new leaf?

He ran his hand along the back of Morse’s head, and Morse groaned again, right as Thursday’s fingertips moved over a tell-tale lump forming at the base of his skull.

Thursday chucked.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, appreciatively. “Cleaned your clock all right.”

Wasn’t the worse he’d seen, thank Christ.

“You’re all right, Morse,” he said. “Up you get.”

Thursday slid his forearm under him then, then, hooking his hand around Morse’s shoulder, bracing him as he rolled him upright.

He had thought that Morse would come back to himself, begin to look about him for some sign of Dr. Vaganova or of his assailant once he was vertical— but instead, he only blinked, his dull blue gaze decidedly unfocused.

Thursday’s heart sunk.

Why wasn’t he saying anything?

“Morse?”

Thursday looked intently into Morse’s face, taking note of the size of his pupils, when, suddenly, he was alerted by the sound of approaching footsteps.

It was Dempsey, striding up to them in a flash of his dark coat, his eyes narrowed behind his heavy glasses, followed by three men in dark suits.

Thursday had thought that they would be about somewhere, Special Branch, keeping an eye on the proceedings. Felt it in his water.

Not that he had caught a glimpse of them so far.

Despite himself, he had to admit it.

They were pretty good, actually.

“Constable Morse,” Dempsey said. “Where is she?”

Morse simply stared up at the man as if he hadn’t the slightest idea as to what he was on about.

“Morse,” Jakes said. “We need you to get it together.”

Dempsey looked to Jakes sharply, then, his mouth a tight line of impatience. 

“Where did he go? What sort of wild goose chase was that he took us on?”

Jakes shrugged.

“Must have known a short-cut from when he was up,” Jakes supplied.

_“What?”_

“Morse. He was a student once, at Lonsdale. Must know the place pretty well.”

Despite his real concern over the disappearance of the girl, Jakes couldn’t seem to help himself—couldn’t seem to help but deliverer this information with a trace of smug satisfaction, just barely discernable, but there, all the same.

Usually, Jakes hated any mention of Morse’s college career, smirked with contempt whenever anyone brought it up, but now, he seemed to relish in it, the implication clear in his voice that perhaps the Special Branch agents should have known a little about the man they had been tailing.

“Isn’t that right, Morse?” Jakes asked.

As much as Thursday might ordinarily sympathize with Jakes, the old acid wasn’t helpful, it didn’t suit.

Although, it was true that the bitter tone his sergeant struck _did_ seem to garner Morse’s attention.

“I cut through the Chemistry Department,” he said, dully, as if it still hadn’t caught up with him, how it was he had come to be sitting on the ground, surrounded by a small crowd of lawmen.

“What’s that?” Jakes asked. 

“I cut through the building that houses the Chemistry department. It’s what I always did when I was late for tutorial.”

“Did you see who it was who clocked you?” Jakes asked.

Morse sat for a moment, mulling it over.

“No,” he said. “He just….”

And then he lifted his hand once more to the back of his head.

“Well. He’s got what he wanted,” Jakes said. “Let’s see if he keeps his end of the bargain.”

Dempsey made a scathing noise, and looked about him once more, as if some sign of the culprit might miraculously appear before him.

“We need a dog team,” Morse said, then—and here, his voice grew firmer, so much so that Dempsey snapped back around to him, as if the whole of his wiry frame had been held on a spring.

“What was that, Constable?”

Thursday watched Morse carefully as he blinked again, as if trying to find his bearings, and then looked up—not to Dempsey—but rather to him. 

“I know you said not to try anything. But. Those sweets. They were aniseed balls. I put one in each corner of the holdall. I thought it might give us a fighting chance.”

Dempsey swiveled around to his men.

“Call out a dog team,” he ordered.

One of the men nodded and turned at once, heading off across the fields, to wherever the hell it was they had managed to hide their car.

“I had to hurry,” Morse said, as if by way of apology. “I thought … _air my grievances,_ the man said. I thought … Perhaps drowning again. No air, you see.”

Dempsey eyed Morse critically for a moment, and then looked over the broad and quiet river, the water just beginning to shimmer in the sliver of pale blue light hovering on the horizon.

He called out to the man who was running across the grass.

“And a dive team, too!” he commanded.

The man turned ‘round for just long enough to nod grimly before heading off once more on his way.

For a moment, the six of them remained as they were, in a somber tableau: Dempsey and his men and Jakes with their hands shoved into their pockets, Thursday crouched on the grass, propping up Morse, all of them lost in thought, allowing all the implications of what Morse had said slowly to wash over them.

The two men accompanying Dempsey began stripping off their jackets, then, preparing to plunge into the river to check the water as best they could before the dive team arrived.

If they found her now, there might still be time ….

Jakes at once began to follow suit, but then Dempsey held up an authoritative hand.

“We’ll take it from here, sergeant.”

“What?” Jakes asked.

Dempsey jerked his head towards Morse, then, the lines of contempt clear in his face.

“Get him back up to the house. See how the inquiries are getting on. We’ll meet you back there later.”

“Now hold on,” Jakes began....

And it was galling, really. Morse did look at the moment like little more than a broken doll, rubbing a hand over the back of his downturned head, but even as he was—even so off his game—he still seemed to have more ideas than anything they had going.

The lad deserved better than that.

And so did Sergeant Jakes.

It had been a good plan.

Already Division had set them on and off the Laxman case, as if they were yo-yos on a string.

And now it seemed as if to Special Branch they were good for little else other than bait, now it seemed they were surplus to requirements.

But as Dempsey took off his jacket and tossed it onto the grass, his steely eyes narrowed, making his message clear.

_Amateur hour’s over._

Jakes opened his mouth to protest once more, but Thursday cut him off.

“Jakes,” he said, his voice a low rumble, and then, almost imperceptibly, he shook his head.

Jakes sighed, but said nothing more, as Thursday slowly helped Morse up to his feet.

***

“You would think Morse’s head was good only for cricket practice, the way they behave,” Jakes muttered darkly as he started up the Jag.

Thursday raised his eyebrows, surprised that Jakes should so defend him, but….

Nothing drew a pair of rivals together like a common enemy, he supposed.

But as it transpired, it was for the best, getting Morse the hell out of there. 

Because once they were three-quarters of the way back to Lake Silence, something seemed to come over the lad, so that he switched gears completely, his dazed silence giving way to an endless and meaningless outpouring of words.

“I thought ‘ _no air’_ … drowning again… but… it doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “How could she have been taken from off the path to the greenhouses? Tweedledum and Tweedledee would have _seen_ something, wouldn’t they?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Thursday saw Jakes steal a curious glance his way, as if to ask him what Morse might be on about, but Thursday simply shrugged.

“No,” Morse said. “It’s all been a diversion. A ruse. … She… That phone call. It wasn’t real.”

“What are you talking about?” Jakes said, then, with a glance up into the rearview mirror. “Of course, it was real. Don’t you remember it?” 

“No,” Morse said. “I know it _happened_. But it wasn’t real.”

“What do you mean, it wasn’t _real?”_

“Thomas Maxwell grabbed the telephone away from me, he was yelling, he was shouting right into the receiver. But the man on the other end of the line went right on talking, just as if he hadn’t heard a word.”

“Man made his point, all the same,” Jakes countered.

“Well. Yes… but … The man said, “ _You’re a policeman. Think of this as an open and shut case.”_ But it wasn’t me who had last spoken, it _wasn’t_ a policeman, was it? It was Maxwell.”

Thursday scowled. He had thought that a bit odd at the time, now that he thought about it.

“It was a recording,” Morse concluded.

“Why would someone bother to do that?” Jakes asked.

“Because. Whoever it was who set up that telephone call, was right there, right at the party.”

 _“What?”_ Jakes asked. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying it’s an inside job. It wasn’t some phantom kidnapper who abducted Dr. Vaganova, who wanted to meet me in the middle of nowhere at four in the morning. It must have been someone she knew, someone everyone knew, someone who belonged at the party. This so-called ransom drop was just a diversion. She’s still there somewhere. At Lake Silence. They both are.”

“Yeah?” Jakes asked. “Then who do you imagine managed to club you all the way from Lake Silence? A man with a ten-mile arm?”

That seemed to stump Morse for a moment, and he slouched back into his seat.

“I dunno,” Morse said. “He must have an accomplice of sorts.” 

Jakes cast another sideways glance to Thursday, then, the doubt evident in his face.

Morse’s theory had just grown one step more baroque.

Morse must have been coming back to himself, though, because he caught Jakes’ sardonic look right away, and he leaned forward, resting his hand on the back of the driver’s seat.

“Call Strange and Trewlove on the radio, then. Call Fancy. See how the inquiries have been going. See if they’ve found anyone yet who noticed anyone suspicious. See if anyone noticed a car leave.”

Before either one of them could respond, Morse went on, his voice steadier, stronger, more insistent.

“You’ll find that they _didn’t._ They won’t find even that one car has left the drive. Because he’s still there. He’s been there, all along, while he’s had us running all over the place. Think about it. It’s the perfect alibi.”

Morse slouched back once more against the back seat, with a thump that shook the whole of the car’s interior, just as Jakes turned onto the drive that led up to Bixby’s stone pile of a house, taking them past the elaborate Italian gardens, all cast in shades of blue in the illusory predawn light.

_“Air my grievances_ ,” Morse muttered.

And then, the atmosphere in the car seemed to change somehow, as Morse went utterly still.

“Oh, my god,” he breathed. “He told me. He told me, and I didn’t listen. I’ve been such an idiot.”

Thursday sighed sharply through his nose.

He wasn’t sure what Morse was on about now, but one thing was clear: he seemed to be going in circles, utterly hung up on that one unfortunate turn of phrase, ‘ _air my grievances.’_

What had he told him about that? About making something out of nothing?

“Morse. You aren’t still brooding over those Tarot cards, are you That element thing?”

“No,” Morse said. “I mean, yes, but it’s not that. It’s …. just…. just …”

And then, he was shouting.

“Stop the car!”

“What?” Jakes asked.

“I said stop the car!”

“Why?”

“Just stop. I need to get out.”

But Jakes merely shook his head. 

“What bloody circus is this now?” he asked.

“Circus, circus, of course it’s a circus. It’s not enough to handle anything simply and sensibly. Everything’s riddles and puzzles. And…. just … _stop the car!”_

Morse made an impatient noise then, as if he had given up on the pair of them, and then, in the next moment, he reached down to the floor of the Jag, took up one of the spare torches, and threw open the car door, bolting out even as Jakes was still rolling down the drive. 

_“Morse!”_ Thursday bellowed, the note of command clear in his voice.

But already, Morse was running.

Jakes exhaled sharply in frustration before hitting the brake and throwing the car into park. 

“I’ll go, sir,” he said. “I’ll follow him.”

He turned ‘round and grabbed a second torch from the backseat.

Wherever he was going, it would seem he might be needing one.

Something that Thursday did not take for an encouraging sign.

The light was dawning, growing softer blue in the east minute by minute—it would be daylight soon enough.

What did Morse want a torch for?

But before Thursday could question further, Jakes was springing out of the Jag, and for once, Thursday didn’t argue.

Rate Morse was going, Thursday would never catch up with him.

Whatever goal Morse had in mind, he was flying towards it in such a way that Thursday couldn’t help but to be left far, far behind.

****

“Morse!” a voice called, somewhere behind him.

“ _Morse!”_

But Morse kept on running, scarcely able to process anything other than those parting words of Bixby’s, which ran through his head like a mantra, as if on an endless loop.

_“Just have to chalk it up to the luck of the draw.”_

Why hadn’t Bixby simply _told_ him what he suspected, his cover be damned? What did it matter at that point?

It was just the same sort of stunt he had pulled out in the woods of Bramford, when he had wanted to clue him in to his identity without giving himself away in front of Sergeant Jakes.

_“I’m a professor over at Beaufort College. Studying the migratory patterns of the common grackle.”_

A little hint to help Morse to place him followed, of course, by that knowing little wink.

Morse snorted at the memory of it.

Studying grackles, my arse.

The most infuriating thing about all of Bixby’s doublespeak was that he seemed to think he was speaking quite clearly, as if he assumed that Morse knew what the hell he was on about.

Although, he supposed … 

And here an uneasy feeling settled heavily in his chest.

He supposed Bixby thought that he was _good_ at that sort of thing.

The way Bix had looked at him as he had said the words, ought, in retrospect, to have given him pause, should have made him stop a moment to think—and, under more usual circumstances, it would have, really.

If, that is, another part of his mind had not been absorbed by quite a different puzzle. 

Because even as Bixby was looking at him so intently, as if to relate his double meaning, Tony was watching him, too, his typically bright expression shadowed with a touch of an uncharacteristic melancholy.

And why should Tony look at him so? What was he thinking?

Morse had felt conflicted enough as it was, being at a party with both of them in attendance, at the same time.

What if—god forbid—they were to fall into conversation with one another?

What if they fell into a conversation about _him?_

It had been his fault, was all his fault, that they had wasted so much time.

He’d been distracted, he’d been too slow.

The only thing he could say for himself was, at least he had gotten there in the end.

Even though Bixby had made his suggestion in an infuriatingly roundabout way, his theory _did_ fit, Morse had to admit it—fit like a piece of a puzzle snapped firmly into place, with a firmness that propelled Morse forward, causing him to redouble his pace.

For Bix had figured that call, too, for a recording. Bix had caught it, too, that odd turn of phrase, “ _air my grievances._ ” Morse had seen it in his face right away, the minute their eyes met in the crowded room. 

The abandoned chalk mine might contain within it any number of forgotten tunnels. It would be the perfect place in which to hide someone away.

And, what was more, with the miners long since gone, the system of smaller tunnels created for ventilation might likewise have long since filled in, with rocks and dirt and stones, leaving the quality of the air questionable—if not perhaps even dangerous— in the mine’s depths.

Or, even worse, how difficult would it be, really, to plant a few sticks of dynamite at the entranceway, cave the place in, leaving someone shut up inside?

Earth, water, air.

Buried, drowned …. suffocated? 

Morse began to run harder at the very thought of it, even as a hand landed on his shoulder, halting him in his tracks, spinning him around.

“Morse,” Jakes said. “Would you just…. Just calm down a second. Where are you going?”

Morse gasped, trying to catch his breath, feeing almost lightheaded with it, the myriad of possibilities circling in his mind.

Was Jakes mad?

Did it look like he had the time to explain it all now?

But Jakes was watching him intently, his chiseled jaw set. The ironic expression that so typically hung about his features—in the draw of his heavy brows or in the quirk of his mouth—had all flown. It was clear that he was keeping an open mind, willing to hear him out.

“There’s an old chalk mine, down at the edge of the property,” Morse said. “A friend of mine told me about it once … that he and his cousin got into trouble, messing about in it. I thought… I thought it would be the perfect place to hide someone.”

Jakes stood for a moment, considering him, and Morse could see he was weighing it out, whether to trust in him or to dismiss him. 

“Are you sure this is the way?” he asked.

“Yes,” Morse said.

With as many walks as he had taken in the woods around Lake Silence, he knew the place like the back of his hand.

His answer must have been firm enough to reassure Jakes, because he nodded, then, for Morse to lead him on, and Morse immediately set off once more, continuing on toward a line of trees in the mid-distance, albeit conceding a bit to Jakes’ surer, steadier pace. 

It must have been colder in the night than Morse had realized, than he had taken the time to notice in his panic and in his flight, because as the morning sun began to rise, it was on a wood that seemed to have turned pure gold overnight, illuminated like fine filigree in that soft light.

Morse continued on, reaching at last the worn footpath that led down through those trees, and, as he went, he found he was glad of it, really, that Jakes had decided to follow him.

Jakes could be slow to act at times, infuriatingly analytical and procedural, but walking along with him thus, Morse felt that his presence seemed to ground him somehow, their very footsteps falling into synch with one another as they moved steadily on. 

“Do you think we’ll find her?” Jakes asked. 

“We’ll find her.”

“Alive? Be nice to go out on a win.”

Morse didn’t bother to grace that with a reply. Considering the ramifications of the case, finding Dr. Vaganova would be well beyond a mere win for them. Or for even for her.

But for the whole of the world.

“This time next month, you’ll be out riding the range,” Morse said, as if to reassure himself. “Or whatever you do with beeves.”

“Hmmm,” Jakes said.

“Second thoughts?” he asked, surprised by the somewhat lackluster response. 

“Maybe,” Jakes conceded. “But no regrets. Life’s too short.”

Morse scowled at the turn of phrase.

It didn’t sound particularly auspicious.

Ahead, lay a wide clearing, and Morse once more quickened his pace, his each nerve strung tight, pulled almost to its snapping point.

Because there it was, at the end of the footpath, the mouth of the chalk mine, half-hidden in a grassy hill, shut up with a rough arched wooden door.

Jakes eyed it critically.

“I thought this posh lot out here sank all their dough into gaming houses and shipping firms. Not dirtying their hands with something like this.”

“There are clay pits not far from here, out at Rose Hill. And a brick field,” Morse said, distracted, as he cast about, looking for something that might help him to pry open the door. “It was quite a little lucrative operation, I understand, after the war.”

“A pound’s a pound, I suppose,” Jakes shrugged.

Then he glanced about, a cloud of doubt gathering once more into his face.

“Look at this place. Nobody’s been near nor by since God knows when.”

“It’s a new padlock,” Morse observed.

Jakes looked to the rough door then, and at once his jaw clenched, his expression turning grim.

He joined Morse in looking about in the overgrowth and soon had the better luck, retrieving a black iron bar from out of a thicket of ferns and rhododendron, which he promptly rammed into the door, breaking it open with a splintering crunch.

Then, he tossed the bar back into the bramble, brushing off his hands. 

“Mind how you go,” he said.

Morse clicked on his torch and started down the tunnel, running the beam of light over the dirt floor below and the arching brick roof above as he went, checking to see that the way was sound.

“Dr. Vaganova?” he called.

Jakes cast him an incredulous look, and, perhaps, in fairness, he _had_ sounded a bit formal, considering the circumstances—rather as if he were standing at her office door, knocking to see if she was in, up for a chat about Class field theory.

Jakes took a deep breath, filling his lungs so that his thin chest swelled with it.

_“Yulia?”_ he bellowed.

The name rang out with a resounding echo, as if it might bring the whole place caving in around them.

“Shhhhh,” Morse cautioned. “You’ll bring the roof down.”

But Jakes’ primal shout seemed to be just what was needed, in that moment. It was faint, but Morse could have sworn he heard a cry of reply.

Morse looked to Jakes at once, as if to make certain that it wasn’t his imagination, that he had heard it, too.

_“Yulia?”_ Morse shouted.

And Jakes had been right, he had a point: Perhaps, that was what people wanted at a moment like this. To be called by name.

Because again they heard it, a muffled reply, and, what was more, this time the direction of it sounded all the clearer.

Morse rushed forwards, sending rocks and loose stones rolling and tumbling along before him, almost tripping over his feet in his hurry.

“Watch yourself,” Jakes said.

As they followed the course of the tunnel, their torches shining in the airless darkness, the incomprehensible cries morphed into words, strangled and misshapen, as if formed by someone struggling against a gag.

_“Help!”_

_“Here!”_

_“Here!”_

At the next turn, they came to an iron grate set across an abandoned passageway, locked behind which, Yulia Vaganova—still in her peacock blue party dress, her dark hair half-fallen out of its elegant updo—sat on the dirt floor, a handkerchief around her mouth and her hands tied behind her, blindfolded, just like the woman on the Eight of Swords, on that Tarot card Mrs. Chattox had laid out before him, back at her strange little cottage.

“Yulia,” Jakes said. “It’s all right. It’s the police. Stay calm. We’re gonna get you out.”

And then, Jakes murmured something low, right in his ear, something that Morse could tell was meant only for him.

“Look at that,” he breathed. “Oh, Christ.”

Morse followed the direction of Jakes’ subtle nod and saw at once what had caused that telltale crack, that treble of alarm in his voice.

On the floor of a dim corner of the cave sat a small steel box covered in elaborate wires and dials and affixed with a round clock, the red needle of its second hand moving smoothly and steadily on, in a bone-chilling and deadly circuit. 

Morse blinked and looked away, his attention drawn by Jakes’ sudden burst of frantic movement as he began to pull at the iron bars, trying to force them to give.

“Go get that bar we used on the way in,” he grunted, as he wedged himself up against the wall, preparing to use his foot for better leverage. “I’ll do what I can in the meantime with elbow grease.”

Morse eyed the movement of the second hand of the clock warily.

How much time did they have, really? 

“You go,” Morse said. “I’ll stay.”

“It’s not a debate. That thing goes off, it could bring the whole bloody place down.”

“You’ve got something to lose,” Morse protested.

“Till the end of the week, I’m still your senior. So get.”

“But ….”

_“Go on!”_

The second hand was moving on, revolving around the numbers on the face of the clock.

Five, six, seven...

Morse turned on the spot and hurled himself back up the tunnel, then, running as if his life—as if all of their lives—depended on it. As he hurtled along, darting up the rocky passageway, he could almost hear them, Jakes’ earlier words, sounding in his head, each syllable like a gasp of breath.

_Life’s too short._

_Life’s too short._

Morse’s foot hit a stone, sending him flying, so that he landed hard, sprawled out on the rocky floor of the passageway. The leg he had scraped on his way to Mrs. Chattox’s house stung red-hot for a moment, before he could feel the blood seeping wet through the knee of his trousers.

_“Please!”_

“Morse!”

It was the cry of a woman who had everything to live for, and then the cry of a man who had everything to live for.

And, maybe, he, too, had something to live for, and then it all rushed clear to him, in a bright epiphany of understanding, why Tony might have looked at him in such a way—why, as Morse had been leaving with Inspector Thursday, Tony had cast him that fleeting look, full of both reproach and of regret. Understood that perhaps Tony had been saddened to see just how easily Morse had put his life on the line, just how quick he had been to offer himself in Jakes’ place, to be put in harm’s way.

As if he had nothing to live for.

Whereas Tony had rather hoped that he had.

And then, perhaps Tony had been thinking of something else, too. 

Of that day when he had sat on the floor of Tony’s study, unwinding the whole of the story by fits and starts, offering excuses and explanations layered with circling self-recriminations, because—even though he had lived it— in the telling it of it, Morse found that it all sounded incredible, impossible…

_“He told me I was there on special assignment. That I was slated for Signals. That he was sorry he did what he did, but that it was a top-secret installation, and no one must know its exact location. And he set problems. He gave me problems to solve and I solved them. And. And that’s all. That’s all. That was my life and . . . and that was all.”_

_He kept his eyes trained on the red medallion on the carpet, but it began to shimmer further before his gaze. Morse blinked and swallowed._

_Tony was silent for a moment. And what else could he be? He would never understand it. How could he when Morse didn’t understand how it had all happened himself?_

_“Are you saying, what . . . exactly? That you were. . . abducted? Held. . . hostage somehow?” Tony asked._

_Morse wasn’t sure what to say. He opened his mouth, but before he could find any words, an odd sort of sound erupted out of him, and he himself couldn’t tell whether it was a laugh or a sob._

_It sounded so incredible, the way Tony—dear level-headed and efficient Tony—said the thing . . . it was unbelievable, he knew. The words sounded almost comical, coming out of his mouth, spoken with that perfectly modulated upper-crust accent. Tony could never believe that such things happen. Not in his perfectly secure and ordered world._

_“I don’t have any excuse. I wish It hadn’t happened. I’m sorry. I never meant for it to have happened. I’m sorry.”_

And Tony _hadn’t_ questioned, hadn’t probed him about how it was he could have allowed it all to happen, to go on an on.

Didn’t say much at all, really.

He had simply kissed the top of his head and murmured a handful of words.

_“I’m sorry, Pagan.”_

At the time, Morse had thought that Tony meant that he was simply sorry such a thing had happened.

But now he couldn’t help but wonder if there hadn’t been something else there, too.

That perhaps Tony was sorry that Morse had felt the need to defend himself, on top of everything else.

That he knew that Morse had never thought he was worth much, really. 

Despite how much Tony had wanted him to.

The second realization followed hard upon the first, filling Morse with a new resolve, and he scrambled to his feet as a flurry of loose gravel tumbled beneath him. And then he was running, with a new determination as fresh as a burst of cool autumn air, as clear as the clear blue sky.

And he wasn’t simply imagining it—it was real, he had reached the door, emerged out into the sun-lit blue and golden day. He rummaged about in the shrubbery outside the entrance of the mine, grabbed hold of the metal bar, and spun around, running back down into the tunnel again, his torch making wild patterns on the damp walls, lighting his way as his feet pounded hard against the uneven ground. 

Soon, he came out into the passageway where Jakes was still struggling against the black iron grate. As soon as Jakes saw him, he tore the bar from his hands, and then, with little ceremony, wedged it against the grid of Yulia Vaganova’s makeshift prison, prying at a section until it gave way.

He scrambled through the gap, over to where the young woman sat on the floor of the cave. As soon as her blindfold was off, and her bonds undone—as soon as she could see and was free to move about—she seemed to regain her composure. There was no time for explanations, nor did they need them. Yulia took one look at the odd blinking unit, its red lights droning off and on ominously in the dark corner, and at once, she seemed to understand, wasted no time making a beeline straight for the space between the black bars, slipping through easily, with Jakes diving through just behind her.

Yulia rose and turned about on the spot … but she must have been blindfolded when she was brought down, or even unconscious… … because it was clear she didn’t know which way to go, didn’t know the way out. Morse clasped her upper arm so as to guide her, and then they were running.

It wasn’t until they were near the top, until they could see that blessed circle of blue daylight, that Morse realized that something was wrong—that he realized that there was no sound other than their own desperate footfalls, that there was no sound of Jakes behind them.

As soon as they made it out the door, up into the world of light, Morse circled about, looking for Jakes to emerge behind him.

“Peter? _Peter?”_

And then the bomb burst, in an explosion of smoke and splintered wood, and, once again, Morse was flying.


	18. Chapter 18

Morse planted his hands in the grass and pushed himself up, coughing as he stood, engulfed in a cloud of dust and debris from the blast.

_“Peter?”_ he called again.

He took a few hurried and unsteady steps towards the mine’s entrance, choking in his struggle to draw breath, his every nerve thrumming at the verge of panic, and then, from out of the midst of the the smoke, Sergeant Jakes emerged, his usually immaculate dark hair thick with dust.

Jakes wiped at his face with the sleeve of his coat and looked up at him.

“What was that about second thoughts?” he asked.

He smiled, then—not his usual sardonic smile, but a genuine one, the sort that reached his eyes, the sort that Morse had never seen there on his face before, really—and shook his head, as if he could not believe in his own good luck, in the vagaries of fate. 

And then, much to Morse’s surprise, he actually started laughing.

It was as if the man had gone quite loopy.

***

They walked back through the wood of sunlit golden trees until they reached the well-manicured and deep green gardens, continuing on past the geometric boxwoods and that quadrangle of marble statuary meant to represent the four seasons— a matched set of nymphs with either flowers or grapes or leaves in their hair—that Morse had always thought rather Rococo, rather over the top.

A little too much to take in at this hour of the morning, certainly.

Morse scowled faintly in disapproval, his steps heavy as he trod along.

How long had he been going now?

The party seemed a lifetime ago.

Jakes, on the other hand, seemed almost to reverberate with it, with a fresh, crisp energy, as if he were determined to solve the case before they even reached the shadow of the sprawling stone house.

“Do you remember where you were?” he asked.

“Yes,” Yulia Vaganova said. “I was just coming out of a pair of French doors, onto the patio. And then … someone put something over my face. It smelled _sweet._ And then … I don’t remember anything else. When I came to …. I thought I was blind at first, it was so dark. I called out, but all I could hear was the echo.”

She sighed then, pulling the hem of her dress up a little as she strode along through the grass.

“We were briefed about this sort of thing, you know,” she said. “Taught to be wary. I feel so _stupid.”_

“You shouldn’t say that,” Jakes said. “Wasn’t your fault.”

He darted Morse a look out of the corner of his eye, then, and added, “It can happen to anyone.”

Morse startled at that and glanced up at him, a glimmer of a memory ghosting along at the edges of his weary mind.

_“He’s completely oversimplified Nietzsche!” Morse shouted._

_“Hey!” Jakes shouted. “Hey!”_

_Thursday thundered into the main office, where Morse and Jakes were locked into a sort of parody of a tug-of-war over a sheaf of papers—Morse trying to rip them apart and Jakes holding onto them, raising his hand higher, as if trying to pull them from his grip and up and out of his reach._

_“You want to have a go at me?” Jakes shouted. “Good! I’m glad!”_

_“Jakes!” Thursday barked._

_But Jakes was looking delighted at Morse’s outburst, smiling oddly as Morse struggled, fighting to get the papers from his hands. Morse finally let out a roar of frustration and took several badly-aimed kicks at Jakes’ shins._

_“There you go! There you go, you little bastard!” Jakes shouted. “Now that’s what you should have done years ago!_ _”_

Morse had almost forgotten now, how he used to feel around Sergeant Jakes, always so ill at ease, as if he were being appraised, being judged and found sorely wanting.

He wasn’t quite sure when that sense had faded—if it had been a particular case, or a particular day, or a particular hour that had turned the tide between them, but one way or the other, turned it had.

Jakes smiled wryly and shrugged, pulling a cigarette from out of his coat pocket. And in that fleeting smirk, Morse could see that he, too, was thinking of those bygone days, half-laughing at all of the battles waged between their younger selves, that seemed, in the scheme of things, almost ludicrous now.

They didn’t always agree, exactly. Didn’t always see eye to eye. Didn’t even understand one another, most of the time.

But they did share a bond that was stronger than all of that.

They were on each other’s side.

It might not be much, but, in their line of work, it was everything.

Jakes lit up his cigarette with a sharp click of his lighter and a whiff of flint, his heavy dark brows drawing together, once again all business.

“Who was the last person you spoke with? Anyone in particular?”

“No. Not, really,” she said. “I was….”

And here, her face flushed slightly pink. Then, she took a deep breath, as if deciding that—considering the circumstances—she might as well come clean with the whole story.

“I was trying to avoid getting locked into any conversation, really. I was… I was planning to meet someone.”

“Maxwell,” Morse said.

“Yes,” she said.

Her voice changed on the word, grew firmer, charged, even, with a hint of defiance, as if to say that she had the right to meet with anyone she pleased, their respective nations be damned. But Morse said nothing.

For he understood all too well.

She had been distracted.

Just as he had been distracted.

And just as Jakes had been distracted.

And what a perfect storm it all had been, really.

Morse couldn’t help but to think of JCN, that forlorn gray box of dials and buttons and reels of tape, blinking steadily on, working any problem asked of it, unencumbered by any other thought. No thought of music or of hope or of love.

Perhaps there was something to be said for the thing, after all.

And then, Morse frowned.

That bomb. It had been a complicated sort of thing.

Not unlike the fashion of JCN, when he thought about it. 

And the way it had blown, right as they were running out of the mouth of the mine—it seemed almost orchestrated. Almost like an operatic sort of finale, the crash of cymbals at the end of a bombastic score.

It was almost as if someone had been watching. Watching and waiting. Waiting to hit the button, to detonate the bomb remotely, even at the very moment that they emerged into the light of the sun.

Morse looked about the lawns, then, taking it all in—the cone-shaped Cyprus trees and the pristine beds of foxglove and lavender—until his eyes were drawn upwards, up to the window of the stone house’s highest tower.

He had stood there in that room once, long ago, getting ready for another party, looking at himself in front of a free-standing mirror, dressed in a kilt and fly plaid and feeling like an absolute idiot.

The room would make for a perfect vantage point, really.

“Is there anyone who might hold anything against you?” Jakes was saying. “Any professional jealousies?”

Yulia Vaganova looked at him, then, a bit incredulously.

“Of course. There are many who don’t think a woman has any place in the lab. Not that I thought anyone hated me _so_ very much.”

Her firm resolve faltered a bit, then, her voice falling to a lower, warbling hush. It was clear that the initial sense of adrenaline that had kept her going was fading, that she was finally allowing it all to wash over her.

“All the while…. I couldn’t help but think of… of Dr. Ellsworth. And wonder if… something … if something like that might happen to me.”

“He had a heart attack,” Jakes said, staunchly, as if to reassure her, whereas Morse scarcely believed that Jakes believed it himself. “He fell into the Cherwell and drowned.”

She huffed, lightly through her nose.

“In my country people also drown,” she said. “Sometimes by accident.”

Morse blinked and looked up at her. It was exactly what Professor Gredenko had told him, after the final chess match.

“What do you think of JCN? The Joint Computing Nexus?” Morse asked.

“What about it?” she asked.

“Oh. You know. How do you feel about it?” 

“I don’t feel anything about it,” she said, frowning, clearly confused by the direction that Morse had taken. “It’s just a tool, isn’t it? It’s neither good nor bad. It’s all in how it’s used.”

“Mmmmmm,” Morse said.

Morse lapsed into silence, then, mulling that over, until, vaguely, he became aware that Jakes was laughing to himself, softly.

Morse scowled.

“What on earth could possibly be funny?” 

“I was just thinking about how you’ve left all those Special Branch ponces over at Lovelace College. Running around with dive teams and dog teams and god only knows.”

Morse glared at him, trying to look as forbidding as possible.

Surely, it was in poor taste to be laughing about the matter now, in front of Dr. Vaganova.

But to his surprise, she was smiling, too, if a bit wanly.

“What?” she asked. “You think I don’t know what it’s like to be underestimated? I always make it a point to root for the underdog.”

“Mmmmmm,” Morse said.

They had _both_ gone a bit loopy, in Morse’s opinion.

The sleep deprivation and the rush of relief that the night was over, that they had emerged alive on the other side and into the golden light of an autumn morning, must have gone straight to their heads.

Morse stole another glance up towards the house. As soon as they were spotted, Dr. Vaganova would no doubt be whisked away by whomever of Dempsey’s deputies had been left behind. Morse thought of what else he might ask her, while he still had the opportunity, but already it was too late.

As soon as they emerged from around the circular tower out to the front of the house, they found that a small crowd was gathered there—three agents in dark suits, Fancy and Trewlove, and, standing alone on the steps, Thomas Maxwell.

Yulia Vaganova broke off from them, then, hurrying off into a run, even as Maxwell was bounding down the steps to meet her … and then he was swooping her up, half-lifting her off the ground, before dipping her back into a kiss.

It was an almost operatic moment, what with the roar of the tremendous fountain that stood in front of the house providing a torrential soundtrack to the scene, something like a thunderstorm, and for a moment, their audience stood as if stunned, frozen into place. 

Finally, the two pulled away, their hands clasped together still as they stepped back to look at one another, each taking in the other as if they had thought they might never see each other again.

And then two of the agents stepped over, bundling her away, leaving Maxwell to stand alone, watching forlornly as she went.

“Well, that was uncomfortable for everyone,” Fancy said.

“I thought it was rather romantic,” Trewlove countered.

Right away, Morse could tell Fancy was changing his mind, could actually see the wheels turning as if he were filing that away for future reference.

The third agent nodded to them, then, grimly, and Jakes went to join him, to brief him on all that had happened.

Morse, however, remained where he was.

He was only a DC, after all. 

And he had someone else he needed to talk to. 

****

The house was a wreck, that much was certain.

Translucent white balloons and golden glitter and blown buds of flowers littered the shining oaken floors, and the air was heavy with the sound of a few desultory notes rippled out by a drunken man slouched over the grand piano. A riot of empty glasses strewn on tables and left in statuary nooks shone clear and pristine in the morning light, making the surrounding disorder all the more palpable by contrast.

There were a few guests, even, who had fallen asleep, draped across sofas or half passed-out on the carpet. One young woman sat slumped on the floor, leaning against the wall and inexplicably blowing bubbles, which drifted through the disorder like distant galaxies, wandering through space.

Morse hadn’t gone far into the house when he found Bixby standing at the bottom of the stairs, nursing a tumbler of Scotch. He looked a bit tired, perhaps, but otherwise just as crisp and elegant in his well-tailored evening suit as he had at the beginning of the evening. 

“Ah. There you are, old man,” Bixby said. “Thank God, you’re back at last. Your Mr. Bright told me I was to keep everything on the quiet. You wouldn’t believe the ghastly night I’ve had, trying to keep all this afloat.”

Morse fought hard against the urge to roll his eyes.

He could scarcely imagine.

In the meanwhile, he’d been ... what, exactly? Clubbed into unconsciousness, sent in a mad panic in a race against a ticking bomb, nearly blown up and sent flying …

Bixby reached out and brushed a layer of dust from out of his hair.

“What the hell happened to you?” he asked.

Then he smiled, as if faintly amused.

“You didn’t actually go out to that idiotic ransom drop did you?”

Morse grimaced.

There was no point getting into that now.

There was something he needed to know.

“I need you to take me up to your bedroom,” he said.

Bixby stood for a moment, as if stunned, and then a slow smile spread across his face, reaching his dark eyes and enkindling their old spark.

“Be delighted,” he said. He tipped his head back, then, finishing off his Scotch in one go before breathing a sigh heavy with satisfaction. “I’d say we deserve the chance to unwind after a night like this.”

Morse could hardly believe it.

Surely, the man must be joking.

“No,” Morse said. “It’s not … that. I want to check on something.”

“Oh?” Bixby asked. “Is that what we’re calling it?”

“About the _case,”_ Morse said, pointedly.

Bixby’s smile faded, then, seeming to pop like one of the fragile soap bubbles drifting through the house. 

“Ah,” he said.

***

“Well,” Bixby said, as he lead Morse up the wide staircase. “You got there in the end. I was right, I take it.”

“Yes,” Morse said. “Although you might have simply told me.”

“Really?” Bixby queried. “I rather thought that I had.”

Morse shook his head, but decided to let that one go.

For now.

He had more urgent matters to discuss.

“What made you think of it?” Morse asked.

“Well. It was the in the way the man said it, more than anything else. “ _Air my grievances.”_ With that subtle stress on the first word. It made me think about what you were saying the other night, out at the lake house. You heard it. I saw you look at me.”

“Yes,” Morse said.

“And then, clearly, it must have been an inside job. All these people about? Your people? Special Branch? So then I thought: Where could I go to stow a hostage away and yet not be missed? A bit of a stretch, but .....”

“Not if he had an accomplice,” Morse said. “Someone to meet him half-way.”

Bixby cast a glance back at him, raising his eyebrows in question. 

“I have ... reason to believe that our culprit is working with someone,” Morse said.

Bixby didn’t need to know the details, didn’t need to know how someone had stolen up behind him, how he had been duped, much as he had been once before. 

“Hmmmmm,” Bixby said. 

He stopped, then, and turned on the step, looking down at him, his face thoughtful.

“Perhaps it was a miscalculation, allowing this party to go on at all. I thought it might present someone with the perfect opportunity, one that might lure our man into our crosshairs, but—trouble is—it seems to have provided the perfect cover as well. Easy enough to pop out and then pop back into the crowd again, without anyone being any the wiser. I never would have dreamed so many people would actually turn up, to be honest.”

An expression of distaste flickered across his handsome features.

“A party to celebrate the end of chess tournament?”

He shook his head, then, as if utterly baffled as to why anyone would have the slightest interest in such a tedious thing. 

But Morse could have warned him, on that score. The tenor of Bixby’s parties was well-known. People would have turned up even if the party had been held to celebrate the anniversary of the birth of Wagner or of the Battle of Kells, or International Crumpet Day, or even the seventy-fifth annual meeting of the British Herpetological Society.

Once the word got out, people simply came, like moths to the firelight.

To his knowledge, he was the only one, in fact, who had ever received an actual invitation.

Bixby shrugged and continued on up the stairs and down a long hallway, at last reaching the large bedroom at the end of the hall. 

He opened the double doors and then stood back, allowing Morse through, into a high-ceilinged room that was all just as Morse had remembered it— the rich, dark wood-paneled walls burnished to bronze in the morning light, the wall-to-wall burgundy carpet that seemed to stretch on an on like an ocean, the immense walnut king-sized bed with its ivory duvet, the heavy stand-alone mirror. 

He crossed the room to the arched windows, over to where the early morning breeze was sending the white sheers billowing like sails, and then looked out—out beyond the gardens, off to the hills of golden trees, off to where the mine lay, somewhere in the mid distance.

If someone had a pair of ordinary binoculars, for example…

“What are we looking for?” Bixby asked.

“I was curious as to whether or not you could see the mine from here.”

“You can see everything from here,” Bix said, a touch of pride in his voice. “Clear across the woods and clear across the lake.”

“Hmmmm,” Morse said.

“Why?” Bixby asked. “What does it matter?”

“There was a bomb, in the mine. The minute we got out, it detonated behind us.”

“You’re joking.”

Morse looked at him, glumly, as if to let him know that he most certainly was not.

“It felt …. _theatrical_ somehow. It blew right at the moment that we got out. And I wondered… if someone might have detonated it remotely. If someone might have been watching, waiting for us to clear it, before settling it off, all for effect.”

“To what end?”

“I don’t know.”

Bixby looked troubled, his usually careless features settling into a frown.

“And you think they might have stood right here?”

“Door wasn’t locked was it?”

“Well, no,” he allowed. “I do leave rooms… available, shall we say. Although I generally assume my guests would have the good enough manners not to use mine. Especially not with the intention of using it as a vantage point from which to set off a bomb that might blow you to Kingdom Come.”

Morse shrugged.

“You only get one go around the board,” he said.

He wandered away from the window, then, lost in thought, and half-collapsed onto the end of the bed, sinking deep into the feathered mattress as he pulled thoughtfully on his ear.

“What is it?” Bixby asked, coming to sit down beside him.

“I dunno. I just feel … I feel as if someone is playing a game with me.”

“How so?”

Morse took a deep breath as he tried to figure how to put it all into words.

“I went to see Mrs. Chattox again. The old woman who lives in that cottage, out in the valley by the Bramford power station. She told me someone else had been out there. Asking questions of the cards. “ _A man of science,”_ she said. Asking about some thwarted love. It made me think of that poem.”

Bixby collapsed back onto the bed, then, throwing his arm up carelessly over his head.

Morse knew it was a sore point with him, that that poem was what he had chosen to retrieve on his clandestine foray into Dr. Ellsworth’s office.

“The thing is …” Morse began.

“Yes?”

“If she told me about him … might she have told _him_ about _me?”_

Bixby said nothing, and so Morse went on, imagining what Mrs. Chattox might say to her unknown visitor.

_“I had a policeman come by. Asking questions of the cards. About Laxman. About the power station.”_

“And she must certainly give the same sort of charlatan’s spiel to all who visit her,” Morse went on. “What if our culprit knows that I know about that pattern? Is setting a puzzle meant … meant for _me_?”

Bixby put a hand to his face and rubbed at his eyes, then, as if the circular reasoning had left him exhausted.

“Like…. ,” Morse said, then. “Like Mason Gull did.”

Bix seemed to still at that, and Morse could tell that he had convinced him of the possibility, after all, that despite his show of weariness, he was listening, keeping an open mind.

“Laxman disappeared long ago,” Morse said. “He must certainly be dead.”

“Must he?” Bixby asked quietly, and there was a trace of compassion in his voice.

Morse swallowed.

Sometimes he almost forgot, that Bixby, too, knew the truth of his past.

“Those glasses,” Morse said, bracingly, determined, now that he had started, to go on. “They weren’t simply lying about in the bramble. Someone made it a point to bury them. To hide all evidence. He must be dead, he’s buried somewhere out there.”

“Hmmmm,” Bixby said.

“I know it and, whoever our culprit is, they know it as well. What if Laxman’s killer decided, in going forwards, to build on it from there? Knowing that I might see it? That it’s a pattern fresh in my mind, too? Earth, water, air, fire?”

Morse lay back then, alongside of Bixby, staring up at the elaborately-molded plaster ceiling, following the white outlines of vines and floral embellishments—that weren’t all that unlike the paintings in his room, really—with tired eyes, mulling it all over.

“It would help if we could figure the motive,” Morse said.

Bixby snorted.

“If Laxman weren’t such a difficult person,” Morse continued, “if he hadn’t made himself so unpopular, it might all have all been simple enough. And then Ellsworth. He presents another difficulty. It seems that he wanted to pull the plug on the project with the power station. But was that common knowledge? Was he killed because he wanted to put a _stop_ to the program at Bramford, or because the culprit feared he was driving _forward_ with it?”

“Mmmmm,” Bixby said. “But, as we agreed, old man. Tonight certainly felt like an inside job.”

Morse sat up then, abruptly.

“So it’s likely our man _must_ be someone who knew of Ellsworth’s intentions. Someone who wants the program to proceed. At all costs.”

His heart quickened at the thought of it.

He _knew_ it.

He had known it all along.

“Then it has to be someone from the plant. It would certainly be telling as to why no one from up there was ever questioned by County.”

“Then why all this tonight?” Bixby asked.

“I don’t ….”

And then, the bubble of hope within Morse burst, just like one of those soap bubbles floating about downstairs.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t think they planned it, do you?” Bixby asked, quietly. “Planned it between them, our star-crossed lovers? Bound to be a bit more sympathy towards them now.”

Morse fell back onto the bed, staring up at the ceiling once more, considering the possibility.

“No,” he said, at last. “No. I don’t think so. She seems to be a straightforward sort of person.”

“People might hide such things,” Bixby said.

“I don’t think so. Not really.”

“I do,” Bixby said, with a trace of a laugh. “I know a rather reserved policeman, for example, who has a secret passion for opera.”

“Hmmmm. Not so very secret, I suppose, thanks to our good friend Miss Frazil.”

Morse sighed, feeling more exhausted by the minute. He was sure he’d be hearing from her soon. He could only imagine the field day she would have with all this. 

He lapsed into a long silence, then, lost in the circles of his thoughts, when, slowly, he became aware that Bixby’s finger was just stroking along the outside edge of his hand.

It was a small motion, but somehow that light brush where their hands lay side by side on the mattress thrummed right through him, so that his breathing slowed, stilling to even, and all of the considerable tension in his muscles seemed to unwind..... so that soon, he was he was sinking deeper and deeper into the mattress, falling further and further into it with each quiet rise and fall of his chest, and then.…

His eyes snapped open.

“Meet me in the garden for tea,” Morse said. 

“Well,” Bixby said, sounding rather disappointed. “Not really what I had in mind. But all right.”

“No. I mean. I had wanted to tell you. Gredenko. After the final chess match, he made it a point to seek me out, to come and speak to me. He seemed convinced that Dr. Ellsworth’s death was no accident. He said that he had overheard one of the Soviet agents accompanying the delegation speaking to someone on the telephone. In English. He said, “ _You must meet me in the garden for tea.”_

Bixby bolted upright, turning to look at him.

“And you’re just telling me this _now?_ Why in heaven’s name didn’t you tell me at the lake house, the other night?”

“Sorry,” Morse said. “I was…”

Morse let the sentence fall away, but Bixby must have guessed well enough how he was going to complete it, because he was looking, once again, rather pleased with himself. 

“Did he say why?” he asked, then. “Why he decided to tell you?”

“He said ... He said the world is a dangerous enough place as it is, without rogue actors complicating matters through ‘unofficial channels.’”

“Well. He’s not wrong there.”

“Does it mean anything to you?” Morse asked. 

“No,” Bixby said.

Bixby rolled himself back down, then, and, for a long while, they simply lay there, side by side. 

The softness of the fresh morning air wafting over him, coupled with the steady sound of Bixby’s breathing beside him, lulled Morse back into stillness, leading him along into that sense of heaviness, of stupor, until his own breathing evened once more, until he was floating, drifting in that space between waking and sleep.

But still, he found he could not rest. Just as his mind was quieting, his thoughts circling like leaves gently falling to the safety of solid ground, a spark of a question arose within him, the first one that Morse had thought to ask him.

“May I ask you something?” Morse said.

“Mmmmm?” Bixby asked, his voice husky now, thick with a trace of sleep. “Ask away, old man.”

“Why didn’t you simply tell me, that you thought she might have been hidden in the chalk mines?”

“I did.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Ah,” Bixby said. “Well. You know, old man. Dempsey.”

“Doesn’t he know who you are?”

“He knows who I am. He knows who both of me are. He just doesn’t know I’m one in the same person.”

He laughed at that, clearly well satisfied with his little joke. 

“No sense of imagination, that man. No sense of style.”

“But ... why?” Morse asked. “Why keep it a secret?”

_“Why?”_ Bixby asked, his voice sharper now, clearly alert. “I’d never have a moment’s peace otherwise, that’s why.”

“Isn’t he all right, though? Dempsey? All in all?”

“Oh, he’s all right. Meticulous to the core. Incorruptible, I’d say. He has the crown’s best interests at heart. But. You know, old man. He’s a bit of a stickler for the rules. Not like you and me.”

Morse scowled at that, offended by the inference. 

_“I’m_ a stickler for the rules,” Morse said.

“Are you?”

“Yes,” Morse said, unequivocally. 

“Just following orders, were you when you slid on in to Dr. Ellsworth’s office?”

“That’s different.”

Bixby laughed again, soft and low.

“If you say so.”

“No,” Morse said. “No. It’s like you said, isn’t it? Dempsey has a duty to the crown. I have a duty to the people of Oxford. And that duty means finding out the truth, if one of their number—or two—have been murdered. Without fear of favour. The truth is the truth. No matter how inconvenient some might find it.”

“Mmmmmm,” Bixby said.

Morse had the feeling that Bix was unconvinced, but that was no matter.

Morse knew he was right, on that score.

“Well now. I have a question for you,” Bixby said at last. 

“What’s that?” Morse asked, hotly, prepared to defend his position against further argument.

Bixby half sat up, then, propping himself on his elbow, as if he wanted to see the whole of Morse’s face, as if to carefully gauge his reaction.

“How was it that Maxwell should have found you first? What were you doing out there, out at the greenhouses?”

Morse blinked for a moment, utterly taken off-guard by the question.

And then he felt himself flush, a rush of warmth flooding fast into his face.

Bixby smiled, looking delighted, as if he’d just been dealt a fresh hand of cards and was looking forward to the challenge of the next round.

“Hmmmmm,” Bixby said. “So. Anyone I know?”

Morse felt his face burn all the hotter. Surely, he must have bypassed red completely, surely he was turning as deep a burgundy as the plush wall-to-wall carpet....

He put a hand to his face, under the pretense of rubbing at his tired eyes, while Bixby laughed again, softly.

“It’s always the quiet ones,” he said.

And then he rolled himself back, lying down once more beside him, casting his arm back over his head.

For a long while, Morse remained where he was, his hot face cooling in the breeze from the fluttering window, his eyes drifting closed as if weighed down by heavy gold coins. Or by a pair of gambling chips from Bix’s pocket.

And then, from down the hall, the distant chime of a grandfather clock brought him back to his senses. 

He sat up, and looked down at Bixby, only to find that the man had fallen asleep, just as he was, in his evening suit. 

Asleep, he looked younger somehow, strangely unguarded without his ever-present play of a smile. For all of his worldliness, for all of his pose, like this, it was clear there could really only be a handful of years between them.

Morse felt an odd sort of stirring then, at the sight of him thus—a dull pain in his chest almost like a strange new surge of protectiveness. 

Bixby might be utterly unflappable, but for all of the man’s flash and bravado, he was awfully naive at times.

Wasn’t he? 

It was a miracle, really, he had made it thus far. 

Morse frowned, and tilted his head, considering him. 

He still wasn’t sure what to make of him, really.

He felt certain, in fact, that the most honest answer he had ever given him on the subject had, in fact, been little more than a vague sort of apology. 

_“Who’s the real Joss Bixby?”_

_“I wonder myself, old man,” he said, looking out over the lake._

“ _I_ _wonder_ _myself_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, no, Morse. Don’t fall asleep up there....
> 
> I hope that chapter wasn’t too slow. I thought Morse could use the break before adventures with Miss Frazil and Bix in the grand finale....


	19. Chapter 19

Morse opened his eyes and then closed them fast, blinking hard against the midday sun.

Then he opened them again, slowly, squinting blearily in order to give them time to adjust to the sudden brightness streaming through his window.

For a long while, he simply lay there, his head burrowed deep into his pillow, allowing his tired gaze to rest on the billowing trees and turning vines and circling birds painted on his wall.

He smiled softly to himself, then, filled with a quiet thrum of satisfaction at the way in which the sun lit the room, so that his painting seemed almost to breathe with a touch of burnished gold.

He had scarcely ever really looked at his murals much, in this particular slant of the light.

And then he bolted upright, grabbing at the clock on his nightstand.

And little wonder. 

It was already half noon.

He leapt out of bed and raced down the stairs, just as he was, in a faded blue T-shirt and a pair of plaid pajama bottoms, anxious that he had been left behind again, that Thursday and Jakes had gone into the nick without him.

But when he came into the dining room, he found that Thursday was there, dressed in a camel-colored cardigan, sitting at his ease and reading the newspaper as if he wasn’t even dreaming of moving from his spot.

“Ah,” he said. “Morse.”

“Why didn’t you wake me?” Morse asked.

“Thought you could do with the lie-in,” he said, turning his attention back to his paper.

“Aren’t we awfully late?”

“What?” Thursday rumbled. “With the way we’ve been going these past two days? We’re taking a half-day.”

“Here,” Thursday said, then, shoving a white plate with two pieces of toast across the lace tablecloth, over to his spot at the table. “Have some breakfast.”

Morse stood for a moment, slightly perplexed, still muddy-headed from sleep—it certainly wasn’t like Inspector Thursday to condone time off in the middle of a case.

Although, he supposed, Thursday most likely thought they had come to the end of one.

Dr. Vaganova had been found, and all’s well that ends well, and, as for the culprit, it was all Special Branch’s bailiwick once more.

Whereas Morse still felt as if he were waiting for the next shoe to drop.

But there was no point denying it. Thursday made an apt point.

There was no possible way he could have kept going, really, at that frantic pace.

So Morse hummed in acknowledgement and headed over to his chair in the corner, slumping into it even as he picked up a piece of the toast. As he settled into his seat, he took a bite of the crust, chewing it slowly, ruminating over the past day’s events.

It was not until he had swallowed that Morse realized just how ravenously hungry he was—that he realized that he couldn’t even _remember_ the last time he had had anything to eat at all, really—and began to tuck in properly. 

Soon, he became aware that Thursday was watching him over the top of his _Oxford Mail._

“I’ll make some eggs,” he said. 

Thursday got up from the table and went off into the kitchen, while Morse continued to devour his toast. And, as his jaw worked steadily away, his mind began to circle through all that had happened the day before—bolting upright in Bixby’s feathered bed, realizing that the man had _actually_ fallen asleep before thundering down the stairs, fearful that he had been missed. The questions and the briefings and Dempsey’s unsmiling face—and Morse’s growing awareness that— even though he had solved the case— he had, perhaps, made an enemy in the process. And then, from the distance, a glimpse of Tony, who still wore that wondering look, before Morse was led away once more, by Mr. Bright and Inspector Thursday for still yet another conference.

The memory of Tony’s face made Morse still for a moment, the toast suddenly dry and rough where it lodged in his throat.

He set the toast down and scowled to himself, softly, suddenly brought back full circle—right to the question that had been at the forefront of his mind before Maxwell had interrupted him out at the greenhouses, before the abduction of Dr. Vaganova had consumed all of his attention.

He pushed back his chair and went over to slump in the doorway of the small kitchen, where Thursday was working at the counter, a silhouette before the single sunlit window that stood over the sink, cracking eggs into a glass bowl.

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Morse said. 

“Yeah?” Thursday asked.

“Do you like ballroom dancing?”

Thursday paused in his work and looked up at him as if he thought he’d gone a bit daft.

“How’s that?”

“Do you like ballroom dancing?”

“Yeah,” Thursday said, turning to pick up another egg. “Go every Saturday night, don’t I?”

“I mean….” Morse said. “Do _you_ really like it? Or do you only go to please Mrs. Thursday? I mean … aren’t there times… say…when a really good match is on….”

Thursday narrowed his eyes at him, suspiciously.

“You trying to get me into trouble?”

“No,” Morse said. “No. I just. I just wondered, is all.”

Thursday shrugged and deposited the thick egg white and yolk into the bowl with a deft shake of his broad hand.

“I like it well enough. I’m still pretty light on my feet, you know,” he added, defensively.

“I know,” Morse said.

“But that’s just how it goes, isn’t it? Give and take. Compromise.”

“Mmmm,” Morse said. “What about ….”

“What about what?”

“What about .... say …. when I came to live here?”

“Oh,” Thursday said. “Well. That we talked about. That we both agreed upon first. Important things, you decide together.”

“And she didn’t mind?”

Thursday cut him a look.

“You’re the detective, Morse.”

Morse slouched even more heavily against the doorframe.

She didn’t, presumably.

Otherwise, he wouldn’t be here now, having this conversation.

“But what if Mrs. Thursday liked … What if she liked to _play cricket?”_

  
He could scarcely keep the disparagement out of his voice as he pronounced the final two words but, still, he had to ask.

Thursday set the next egg down on the counter and looked up at him.

“What is this?” he asked. “Twenty questions? What’s all this about?”

“Nothing,” Morse said.

“Mmmmm,” Thursday grumbled.

And then he reached for the final egg.

“Sounds like yesterday you and Sergeant Jakes were nearly blown up, down in the chalk mines,” he said. 

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

Thursday paused once more to look at him, a shrewd expression on his face.

“Go to the cricket match, Morse. It won’t kill you. Not like Donn hasn’t sat through enough of your concerts, is it?”

“I wasn’t ...,” Morse began. “I wasn’t talking about Tony.”

“No?”

“No.”

Thursday said nothing, only shook his head, as if to say that he knew better than that, and then pulled a whisk out of a crowded drawer.

Morse rolled himself out of the doorway and headed back into the dining room, kicking himself for his utter lack of subtlety.

Even after an almost forty-eight-hour stint, it hardly took a Detective Inspector, he supposed, to figure out what it was that was truly on his mind.

He slumped back into his chair and picked up the last bit of toast, his jaw working to polish it off even as he stared at a white tea pot on the buffet against the opposite wall, lost in thought. 

The he snorted, softly to himself.

Narratives without plot. That old conflict of man versus man, without any grace of storytelling.

That’s all that sport, was really.

Although cricket wasn’t so very terrible, he supposed.

He did know the rules, least.

Wasn’t as if it was whatever Bixby might enjoy, from his school days.

What would that be, exactly?

Baseball, was it? Or that horrible sort of so-called “football” where nothing much ever happened, where the two teams seemed to take an inordinate amount of time lining up in a certain precise manner, only to run into each other?

Yes, that must be it.

Apropos really, that Bixby might enjoy something that most reasonable people would find completely incomprehensible.

He wasn’t sure if he understood either of them, really. How did the Thursdays make it look so easy?

How could anyone ever hope to figure anyone out, hope to know the innermost workings of another’s mind?

He wasn’t even sure if he understood himself half the time.

Morse exhaled sharply though his nose and then rubbed his hand over his weary face. Suddenly, he felt like he’d like nothing better than to shower and to dress and to head back into the nick.

Suddenly, dealing with the workings of this case—which was not, as much as Thursday might like to believe, over—seemed much easier than sorting out all of the tangled feelings that he just didn’t know what to do about, all the vagrancies and vacillations that so played upon his mind and in his own yet unfathomable heart.

***

Morse sat at his desk in the corner, crammed up against the radiator, his leg bouncing with nerves as he clicked his pen by his ear.

_Click-click Click-click Click-click_

Ostensibly, he was looking over a report detailing a string of car thefts in Jericho, but, as his eyes floated over the words, his mind drifted elsewhere, until the clicking of his pen seemed to carry within it a rhythm, a rhythm of words that repeated themselves like a chant in his mind. 

_Never again would birdsong be the same._

_And to do that to birds was why she came._

He stole a surreptitious glance around the office and then pulled out a manila file hidden in the bottom of his drawer.

He began to flip through it, then, page after unhelpful page. Photos of Laxman at anti-nuclear rallies. Terse statements from the taciturn citizens of Bramford. Police sketches of the clothes that Laxman had last been seen wearing.

None of it yielded the slightest clue.

Nothing, nothing, nothing. 

Morse sighed in frustration. And then, suddenly, the telephone on the edge of his desk rang, loud and shrill. Absentmindedly, his eyes still trained on the case file before him, Morse picked up the heavy black receiver.

“Morse.”

“Hello, Morse. It’s Dorothea Frazil.”

Morse rolled his eyes. 

He knew this was coming.

“I can’t comment,” he said.

“So, are you clairvoyant, now? I haven’t asked you anything, yet,” she said, a trace of amusement in her voice.

“I know I can’t tell you anything....” and here, he grimaced, because it was painful to admit, “because I don’t know anything.”

He looked at the thin file before him, turning the pages to where interviews of employees from the power station by rights ought to be.

“Now, if only I could find some way to gain access to the Bramford power station,” he added testily, “it might well be a different story.”

“Well, I’m due to go out there, to interview the director, Elliot Blake,” Miss Frazil said.

Morse tightened his grip on the receiver.

“How’s that?”

“The new Joint Computing Nexus program is being put into implementation next weekend, and we’ve been invited to bang the drum.”

“By whom?”

“Blake himself. Hoping for a little good PR, I suppose. There’s been a lot of bad feeling about their plans to flood the valley for a reservoir for their new reactor. And of course, about JCN itself. It seemed during the tournament that there might yet be a few glitches in need of working out, in light of that second match.”

“Mmmmmmm,” Morse said.

“Perhaps if the opportunity presented itself for you to go out to the station, you might find you have a story for me, after all. I would invite you to come along,” Miss Frazil said. “Only….”

Morse’s grip on the receiver tightened still further, so that he was clutching onto it like a lifeline, his palm slick with sweat.

“Only what?”

“Only I worry that any such recompense would leave us both open to charges of bribery and corruption.”

Morse sank with disappointment into his chair.

He well deserved it, he supposed.

They were, after all, his exact words parroted back to him, the ones he had said to her twice over: first, when her photographer had taken him by surprise after his concert, two years ago, and then again when she had helped him after he had escaped from Bellevue.

Morse sighed again, then, bitterly, and ran a hand through his hair.

“Morse,” Miss Frazil said.

“Mmmm?”

“I’m joking.”

“Oh,” Morse said.

She paused for a moment, as if mulling something over.

“How are you with a camera?” she asked. 

***

Morse looked out the open window of Miss Frazil’s little blue car as the trees blew past, the leaves filled with the windbright gold of the last days of September, brilliant as the shine of the sun against blue skies. In a little more than a month, no doubt, they’d turn the translucent color of candlelight, glimmering amidst gray clouds, somber and still.

But as for now, the world still teemed with that last swan song of the summer, that burst of life of the harvest, ripe and sweet, a time of year that seems to sing with all things bright and new.

It was all just like the words that Bixby had underlined in the worn paperback copy of _The Great Gatsby_ that he had left behind for him at the lake house after their first case together.

_“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”_

Morse closed his eyes, reveling in the feel of the wind on his face and in his hair. It was a beautiful day, the sort of day he had once dreamed about, even when he had begun to wonder if the outside world had ever been real at all, or if it had all been a mere dream from the start, a figment of his imagination without any corollary.

Miss Frazil turned the wheel, sweeping the little car along a winding curve with a brisk efficiency that was typical of all that she did, from lighting a cigarette to crossing a crowded conference room.

She tended to drive faster than Jakes, but, somehow, she inspired more confidence than the sergeant, who was, truthfully, always a bit erratic behind the wheel, always stopping a fraction too short, taking a turn a bit too wildly.

Now that Morse thought about it, he couldn’t help but wonder if he’d do better on a horse, actually. A stallion born in the wilds of Wyoming might enjoy such rambunctiousness more than the poor unwieldy old black Jag.

After a few miles of rolling green countryside dotted with black and russet cows grazing or walking or else simply sitting by small ponds, enjoying the feel of the sun on their broad backs, Miss Frazil made another turn, and Morse sat up, his pulse quickening, as the power plant with its enormous white cooling towers came into view.

By the time they pulled up to the gate house and barricade, Morse’s good mood had completely evaporated, a new tension growing deep within him, so that he found himself gripping the handle of the car door, his every muscle taut with suspense.

He had called so many offices, had run himself round in circles, trying to gain access through those gates.

It was incredible to believe that it was a little smoke and mirrors, the barest pastiche of a false identity, that might actually do the trick.

It was like a stunt Bixby might pull, really. Never him.

Suddenly, Morse found himself remembering once more that first night he had gone up to Bixby’s tower bedroom, during the Gull case, when he had stood before the walnut-framed mirror in that blue and green tartan kilt and fly plaid.

_“No matter,” Bixby said. “You’ll soon learn that this line of work is eighty percent improvisation.”_

_“Eighty percent?” Morse cried._

Horrifying.

It was a miracle, really, the man had made it as far as he had.

And yet, here Morse was, rolling the dice, playing the same sort of game.

A man with graying hair and dressed in a gray uniform came out from the booth, then, and ducked down to peer at them through the car window.

“Dorothea Frazil. Oxford Mail,” Miss Frazil said. “I’ve an appointment with Mr. Blake.”

The security guard nodded, but then the man’s eyes trailed straight towards him, over to where he sat in the passenger’s seat, his expression wary, the question in his face clear.

“My photographer,” Miss Frazil said. “Snappy Jenkins.”

Morse tried to keep his face carefully neutral, despite being surprised at both the ease with which she had delivered the lie—all the way down to Christening him with a new name—as well as by the tenor of the name itself.

“Wait there,” the man said. 

As soon as the man’s back was turned, Morse twisted around in his seat.

 _“Snappy?”_ he protested.

Miss Frazil shrugged, her poker face perfectly intact. 

“Well,” she said, breezily. “You can be.”

***

They waited at the end of the road until an olive drab Jeep pulled up to meet them, and then, slowly, they got out of the car.

The man who bounded out of the driver’s seat of the Jeep was rather more flamboyant than Morse had expected. With a full, trim beard and slicked-back long curling hair, his shirt left unbuttoned to reveal the twist of an indigo silk scarf at his throat, the man seemed more of a showman than an engineer.

Although, Morse supposed, that was his role, really: to be the public face of the whole, sprawling establishment. He reminded Morse of no one so much as Sebastian Fenix, really, that silky and flamboyant so-called parfumier he had had dealings with two years ago.

“Elliot Blake,” the man said, grandly, as he approached them. “Director of Operations. Welcome to Bramford.”

“Thank you,” Miss Frazil said.

“And this is your…. photographer, is it?” Blake asked.

The pale blue eyes behind the heavy-framed glasses roamed over him, then, clearly filled with doubt.

Morse wasn’t sure how far Miss Frazil intended to take the ruse, so he said nothing; merely worked to keep his face still carefully neutral. He had thought that he might pass muster—his forest green jumper vest and tweedy blazer, along with his tousled hair, blown about as it was from the ride over, gave him a vaguely bohemian look that might, he thought, make him seem the sort.

But Blake was obviously suspicious of him, nonetheless.

“For today,” Miss Frazil said. “But the rest of the time, he works at the City Police.”

The man’s face changed then, grew slightly colder, as he gave him a grim nod of understanding.

There was no chess board between them, but, from that moment on, it was plain that they were locked in a definite game of strategy. Morse could sense it, see it in Blake’s retreating smile.

“Detective Constable Morse,” Miss Frazil said, introducing him. “He tried to make an appointment to get onto the site to see you without success.” 

“I was told someone from the City Police had telephoned,” he said, tersely. “That was you?”

“Yes,” Morse said. “That was me.”

Another silence fell, then, rather more disagreeable than the first. It was almost possible to imagine that they were hitting a clock between moves, watching one another appraisingly, just as Professor Gredenko and Dr. Updike had done in that final match.

Morse stole a glance at Miss Frazil, wondering if she, too, had sensed the chill, and then went on, determinedly.

“A Dr. Matthew Laxman, who worked at the botanic gardens, went missing from the area around five years ago,” Morse said.

“Yes. I remember,” Blake replied. “What has that to do with the station?”

“It appears some of our colleagues at County failed to question anyone on the site. Do you remember Matthew Laxman visiting the station?”

“Well, we work very closely with many scientific departments....,” Blake began.

And then, there it was, that drop of condescension—not quite a sneer, but almost.

“But I can’t recall ever receiving a delegation from _the botanic gardens.”_

“Mmmmm,” Morse said, smirking faintly as if he appreciated the little joke—one laid out, of course, at his expense. 

Morse let it go at that. He had been on the job long enough to know that sarcasm is the defense of the weak.

“But you’re very welcome to join Miss Frazil on the tour,” Blake said.

The director smiled then, if a bit disingenuously, and, much to Morse’s surprise, he managed to keep up the game, to smile back.

Morse almost wished that Bix was there to see him, really.

***

Morse sat perched in the back of the Jeep, hanging on tight to a metal bar on the back, the wind blowing through his hair in a manner that instilled him with a sense of recklessness that was utterly at odds with the churning feeling of unease deep in his gut.

The white cooling towers that the Jeep rumbled past reminded him with startling clarity of the lightning-struck tower on Mrs. Chattox’s final card, and the main building seemed equally as sinister: white and squat with rows and rows of windows staring out with rectangle-shaped eyes, it looked almost like a spider, looming over its prey.

But then, just beyond the fence topped with spiraling barbed wire, the pastoral world of Bramford rolled on and on in endless gold and green, a collision of two worlds almost breath-taking to behold. 

Blake hit a bump, throwing Morse from his seat so that he was suspended momentarily in mid-air. For one wild moment, he thought that he might fly out the back of the vehicle. But then, in the space of only a heartbeat, he tightened his grip on the bar and landed hard back onto the metal bench.

Morse looked to the front, sharply; he almost wondered if the man had done it on purpose. 

But Blake was driving serenely on, his face unreadable as he spoke, raising his voice above the roar of the engine as he eased the Jeep into a turn around the perimeter of the fence.

“Bramford has been in operation since shortly after the war,” he said. “Early work here helped Britain take its rightful place at the atomic table.”

“Keeping up with Uncle Sam?” Morse observed.

“And Uncle Joe,” he affirmed.

Morse rolled his eyes.

Of course, they had to keep up. They all had to keep up. 

The man spoke of the pursuit to harness nuclear power—and by extension, the arms race—as if it were a contest, a sport, as if it were possible to look at the numbers on some enormous, imaginary scoreboard to see who was winning.

When who could ever really win? No matter what safeguards they might put into place, no plan was failproof.

Someplace, somewhere, accidents were bound to happen

Just like Jacques Hadamard had postulated long ago.

All trajectories are unstable.

_I am become death the shatterer of worlds._

Morse shook his head, lightly, as if to clear the words away.

“Please, put these on,” Blake said, passing them each a small black badge.

“What is it?” Morse asked.

“Film badge dosimeter. Purely a precaution, but safety is our priority.”

Morse turned the small black square in his fingers, examining it from all angles. “What does it measure?” he asked.

“Cumulative radiation dose. Should there be any exposure, the film will darken,” Blake said. “But don’t worry. That won’t happen.”

“Well, that’s put my mind at rest,” Miss Frazil said.

Morse huffed a laugh, lost to those in the front by the sound of the Jeep’s engine.

If he needed any confirmation at all, there it was.

Miss Frazil didn’t trust the man, either.

***

“And the radioactive material. Is it safe?” Miss Frazil asked, as they came to the top of a spiraling metal stair.

But her words scarcely registered in Morse’s mind, seeming to resound from almost a lifetime away.

For as soon as they emerged into the immensity of the high-ceilinged and rounded control room, it was all Morse could do but to revolve slowly on the spot, taking it all in.

The sterile white walls were affixed with row upon row of screens and dials and buttons—all laid out in perfect, relentless order, all stark and ruthlessly antiseptic …. because there was no need for the mess of working the numbers on the walls—the numbers were, in fact, _in_ the walls, hidden deep within the hardware of its depths, deep in the guts of the machine, and he, too, was inside of it, swallowed whole, like Jonah in the Whale.

“Perfectly,” Blake said. “More radioactivity comes down the Thames from Oxford due to the hospitals than comes out of Bramford. And now, with the implementation of the new advanced Joint Computing Nexus program next weekend, it will be virtually fail-proof—with all parameters monitored and operations controlled by computer, removing all risk of human error.”

Morse’s ears pricked up at that, bringing him back to himself.

Did they have a particular concern about the possibility of human error? Was Blake referring, however obliquely, to the leak, to the accident of five years ago? 

If so, the remedy, surely, was to get to the truth of what had happened. Not to rely on JCN to solve all of their problems.

“Presumably, there’s a human fail-safe, beyond the computer?” Morse asked, crisply. 

And then—it was almost prophetic—as if his very thoughts, his very fears, had made the catastrophe come true. 

Suddenly, the white room was bathed in red, all of the many dials and the screens and even the faces of the engineers rendered into things otherworldly, illuminated by that ominous hue. In the space of his next heartbeat, a reverberating alarm blared so that the whole place shook with it, a merciless, repetitive tone that made Morse flinch and raise a hand to his ear.

It was like a ring of Dante’s Inferno.

“Don’t be alarmed,” Blake said. “It’s just a test.”

The lights cut off and then on and then off again, as if they were tottering on the brink between two worlds; for a moment, all was restored to its natural state, and then they were plunged back into a nightmare world of eerie blood-red shadows.

And then, just as soon as it started, it all stopped.

Morse frowned and blinked, slowly shaking his head as if to recover himself.

Incredibly, Blake and Miss Frazil continued on with their conversation as if nothing had happened .... so that it took him a few moments to realize that Miss Frazil had handed him his next move on the chessboard.

“I’ve a few questions about Bramford’s contributions to the arms race, Mr. Blake. I’m sure Morse will excuse us,” she said.

She looked at him, then, and there was nothing pointed in her smile. Rather it, seemed the most natural thing in the world, that she and Blake should retire in private conference to speak further in regards to her article ….

Thereby leaving him the free and unsupervised run of the place.

It was deftly done.

Blake, whether he was telling the truth or not, was a slippery sort, his answers either vague or rather all too well-rehearsed.

The regular rank and file of engineers in the control room—those milling about or else working at their stations—were not likely to be so polished.

Blake stood for a moment, wavering a little in his expensive and well-shined shoes, his piercing pale blue gaze suddenly betraying a hint of uncertainty.

As unhappy as he was with the idea of letting Morse loose unsupervised, he was clearly loath to admit as much in front of Miss Frazil—the very woman he was hoping would give his operation a good spin.

“Of course,” Blake said, at last, turning to lead Miss Frazil away.

“And if you could dig out your visitors’ books, I’d appreciate it,” Morse called after him.

Blake stopped in his tracks and stared at him, as if he thought Morse was rather pushing his luck, but Morse only smiled, the most winning and genuine smile he could manage, even to the point where he could feel a warmth in his blue eyes that was not really there.

“Of course,” the man said grudgingly. “As Miss Frazil said. We’ve nothing to hide.”

She hadn’t said anything of the sort, but, miraculously, Morse managed to stop himself from pointing that out.

Being right, in this case, would not necessarily get him any closer towards his goal.

****

Morse looked out the window, his arms folded as he sat slumped in the passenger’s seat, his heart heavy with bleak disappointment.

As it transpired, Blake was right.

They didn’t have anything to hide.

Nothing that, is, on record. Nothing that hadn’t been shredded, or burned in the dead of night, or otherwise disposed of long, long ago.

It had been just the same as the wasted day he had spent in Bramford, the engineers every bit as unhelpful as the villagers.

_“I don’t recall any botanists visiting the plant that year or any year, for that matter.”_

_“Yeah, I was here in ’62. But like I said. I never met the guy.”_

It was as if Matthew Laxman were a chimera, as if the man had never existed.

Everywhere Morse turned, he hit a wall.

It was all too much.

“You can let me out here,” Morse said, suddenly restless, surging forward in his seat.

“It’s the middle of nowhere, Morse. Are you sure?”

“I need some fresh air.”

Miss Frazil shrugged and pulled the little blue car over to the side of the road, slowing it to a halt.

She looked at him, then, with a steady and steadfast scrutiny that left Morse squirming under her gaze.

“All well? You seem out of sorts.”

“Oh,” Morse said. “You know. Things have just been… complicated.”

She raised her eyebrows, then, as if to ask when was it ever otherwise, but there was a certain sympathy in her face, too.

“Care to talk about it?”

Morse twisted his mouth in disapproval; that was the very _last_ thing he wanted, now or ever.

“It’s not important,” he said, and then he circled his palm around the cool metal handle of the door.

“You know,” Miss Frazil said. “I stuck my neck out for you once. ‘Aiding and abetting’ you had called it. Do you remember?”

Morse paused and turned back to her, uncertain as to why she would choose to bring up that day now, right when he was already so low.

It was a day he would like nothing better than to forget, really. He could only imagine how he must have looked, barreling into her office in those Bellevue-issued pajamas, his face black and blue from his tussle with that brute of an orderly.

“Yes,” Morse said, cautiously, unsure as to where she was going with her line of inquiry.

“You don’t trust me,” she said.

Morse blinked at the non-sequitur. It was a statement, rather than a question, one that left Morse at rather a loss as to what to say.

It did make him sound rather ungrateful, he supposed. It was true, what she had said. At the time of that meeting, he had been a wanted man, an assumed lunatic who had assaulted a psychiatrist of some standing, who had been institutionalized and had made a desperate escape.

And yet, she had given him the information that proved crucial in solving a case. Offered to deliver his message of only a few words to Inspector Thursday.

_Keith Miller._

_I’m the killer._

And then she had given him the change of clothes her sports editor kept in his office and showed him out the back door.

Morse swallowed.

“It’s … it’s nothing personal,” he said. “I don’t know if I ever trust anyone, really.”

“Why is that, do you think?”

“Oh. You know.”

“Won’t get far in this line, always going it alone,” she observed.

“Hmmmmmm,” Morse said.

She rolled her eyes, then, slapping her hand lightly on the steering wheel in exasperation.

“I’m inviting you out for a pint, Morse.”

“Oh,” Morse said.

And then, _“Oh.”_

Morse frowned, trying to ascertain her motive. She had gotten him into the power station, as promised, and he had come away with nothing… he hadn’t a story for her. Nothing at all, really.

And then it came to him.

“Ah. That man. Finn, was his name? I told you at the first match that I would help him with his novel. I’d forgotten.”

He did have a few ideas. That tiger, for one. And why not write a mystery after the style of The Great Gatsby? The blue gardens, the house filled with hidden doorways, the mysterious host. It had all the ingredients, really.

But Miss Frazil waved her hand, dismissively. “Oh,” she said. “Him. He was good for a few laughs, but I’ve already moved on, I’m afraid.”

“Hmmmm,” Morse said. “Well. I thought you could do better.”

Miss Frazil twisted her mouth, then, in what seemed to be an attempt to hide a smirk, and, too late, Morse realized it had been quite a personal thing to say.

But she didn’t seem to hold his lack of tact against him. On the contrary, she seemed rather amused.

“I’m sorry that you didn’t find the answers you were looking for, Morse.”

“Mmmmm,” Morse said.

“But you have to admit. It was a little fun, wasn’t it?”

Despite himself, Morse smiled. 

“Yes,” Morse said. “Yes, I suppose it was.”

  
“So,” she said, extending her hand. “Are we friends, after all, then?”

Morse paused for a moment…. he hoped that she knew this didn’t mean he would always tell her everything … anything that might jeopardize a case, for example. He had a duty to serve all, without fear or favour. Even if it was a favour for ... for a friend.

He wasn’t sure what to do at all, really, how to say it, but soon he found that she was looking at him so forthrightly, that he couldn’t help but to take her hand.

“All right,” he said.

“Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?” she asked.

“Hmmmm,” Morse said.

He opened the door and climbed out of the small car, then, grateful as much for the chance to stretch his legs as to be free of that most awkward of conversations.

But then, he thought the better of it, and spun around, bracketing his hands on the window to stop her before she could drive away.

“Oh. And thank you. For today.” 

“Don’t mention it.”

“No,” Morse said. “No. I mean it.”

“I mean it, too.” She looked him up and down and smiled, ruefully. “Looks like that was all painful enough for one day.”

She lifted her chin, then, encouragingly.

“Do try to cheer up, Morse.” 

“Hmmmm.”

“Well,” she said, setting her car back into gear, “I’ll leave you to your solitude, then. See you back in town, Snappy.”

Morse opened his mouth to protest, but already she had pulled away, the little blue car already growing smaller and smaller as it headed down the winding dirt road.

He sighed.

So.

He had a new nickname, it would seem.

Not as embarrassing as Pagan, he supposed.

Or perhaps, he thought, straightening his shoulders, standing a little taller ….

Perhaps…..

Perhaps, one might even say that he, too, now had his own secret identity. 

***

Morse strolled along through the tall grasses, his blazer slung over his shoulder, his shirtsleeves rolled up, so that the golden sun shone warm on his face and his forearms.

It was odd, being out here on a late Monday afternoon. If he hadn’t been so frustrated about the case, it might have been exhilarating. He might have felt like a truant schoolboy, reveling in the beauty of the day and the freedom to walk its ways.

At the top of a hill, he collapsed into the grass, leaning back on his elbows as he stretched out in the shadow of a scarecrow tied with ribbons and strips of burlap and cans that rattled dully in the wind. It was a soft sound, unlike the blare of the power station’s alarm, but then, this world was soft. The grass and the sky and the breath of the warm wind, like a sigh. It was like falling into a painting by Van Gogh, all brilliant color and wavy lines.

Morse lifted his face towards the sun, and, just at the moment he was about to close his eyes, his heart leapt in his chest.

That jacket.

The scarecrow’s jacket.

He had seen it before.

Slowly, Morse rose to his feet, scarcely able to believe what he was seeing.

Legwork, Thursday had always said, was at the heart of police work, and while Morse had found it to be good advice, he never thought he would ever see it proved true quite so literally.

He ran a cautious hand over an oval patch on the left elbow of the sleeve. It was identical to a patch on Laxman’s sleeve, in the police sketch.

He examined the jacket then, wonderingly, running his fingertips over the tweedy fabric.

And then he began to search its pockets.

In one, he found a small book—a small maroon leather appointment book. 

He flipped it open. There was no name in the front cover, but it was well-used. Surely, there was something here, someone he could trace.

He thumbed through the pages until he reached the final entry.

_September 21, 1962_

_Charlotte Walker._

_3 o’clock._

He stared at the page for a long while, then, as if the identity of Charlotte Walker might miraculously reveal itself.

Then he pocketed the book and began to search the inside pockets, thrusting his hand amidst the scarecrow’s golden, bristling straw.

And, then, in the silk lining, he felt just the brush of it—a sharp edge.

He pulled it out to find it was a film dosimeter, much like his own, the one still clipped to his own jacket.

The only difference was, really, that it was much darker ... so dark, in fact, that Morse couldn’t help but wonder if he should really be holding it in his hand.


End file.
